Maximize innovation potential with regular upgrades

To fully reap the benefits of cloud ERP, organizations must keep systems agile and efficient by following a clean core approach and keeping solutions up to date with the latest patches, feature packages (referred to as “updates” in this document), and releases (referred to as “upgrades” in this document). Regular upgrades create the foundation to benefit from the latest innovations (such as AI), minimize costs for unnecessary custom code, and extend system value. Unfortunately, the status quo across industries is still infrequent upgrading and the inability to consume innovations in a timely manner.

Once a system has complexities such as proliferating process variants and inflexible custom code, you reach a point where you must act to protect your ability to innovate. Either you have to tidy up the system piecemeal – which is a difficult task rarely undertaken – or you need to implement a whole new system. Until then, the existing system is usually an innovation inhibitor. But a regular upgrade routine will ultimately make each single upgrade faster and cheaper – and sometimes even a “non-event.”

Today, many organizations upgrade their ERP systems very infrequently after their expensive initial implementation project, and they regularly exceed maintenance windows. They may in fact keep using the release they initially installed for up to ten years. During this timeframe, IT organizations address requests to enable business innovation by adding “nuts and bolts” or “customization balconies” – essentially custom code. Even worse, lines of business may resort to their own best-of-breed solutions. This is a costly approach that results in a vicious cycle in which ever more complex IT solutions become ever more difficult to upgrade. IT teams come to lack knowledge and best practices related to upgrades, re-usable project practices, and such helpful assets as test automation.

That means that you miss the opportunity to leverage the innovations which come with every new release of SAP standard functionality and may well address known line-of-business requests. Specifically for an IT organization, this holds tremendous potential to change its role from a reactive, sometimes slow enabler of stopgap innovation to a driving force and leader in strategic innovation.

In software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP environments, the software provider typically manages upgrades and ensures overall business continuity, but customers have limited flexibility to customize or extend their systems.. With SAP Cloud ERP Private, customers benefit from greater flexibility in configurations and extensions. This also means that release upgrades and updates require careful customer-specific planning, preparation, and execution to ensure business continuity.

While SAP handles the technical execution of upgrades, the end-to-end responsibility for updates and upgrades remains with customers. To support them, SAP provides an extensive set of services, assets, and tools to assist with their updates and upgrades.

This document is designed to help IT leaders on their journey to regular upgrades. It summarizes the benefits of regular upgrades and SAP-recommended best practices and guidance for private cloud customers. It also includes high-level guidance on how to build regular update and upgrade routines, with links to a wealth of more detailed assets and tools.

Changing your organization’s update and upgrade mindset and approach holds tremendous potential for unlocking agility and innovation. An ERP system that is always running the latest release and leveraging the latest SAP standard innovations is the alternative to costly, one-time implementation projects of inflexible customer-specific solutions that age quickly. With a system that is regularly upgraded, you can realize the benefits of the latest innovations and UI technologies, including AI and sustainability features.

By applying updates and upgrades regularly, you also ensure that your ERP system stays secure, compliant, agile, and stable. When updates and upgrades are part of a habitual procedure, each one becomes faster and easier for your organization. Don’t wait for push factors like outdated technology, limited scalability, inadequate data reporting and analysis capabilities, or lack of support for mobile devices to make the need to upgrade obvious – and more far-reaching change inevitable.

In the following sections, we cover the major innovations available in the latest release of SAP Cloud ERP Private that make it a compelling upgrade for unlocking business value.

Increase differentiation with new features in SAP Cloud ERP private

In the current world, businesses cannot rely on a unique selling point for their success. You must be proactive on all fronts to remain relevant, with technology a pivotal pillar for stimulating growth. The latest capabilities and technologies empower your organization to stay ahead of the competition and utilize the opportunities presented by the global market. Each release of SAP Cloud ERP Private comes with a new set of capabilities bringing simplification, innovation, and automation to you and your end users. As part of your SAP Cloud ERP Private package, you are paying for those innovations, so it makes sense to take advantage of them by regularly upgrading and always running the latest release.

Highlighting key innovations

In recent releases, we’ve introduced a wide range of application innovations in SAP Cloud ERP Private across all lines of business. These major innovations significantly enhance older releases of SAP S/4HANA and SAP ERP. For details of innovations in the latest release (2025 FPS0), see the What’s New Viewer, our Release Highlight Summary, and our Release Highlights in Detail. For innovations in the previous releases (2023), see our Release Highlights and innovations blog, or the SAP Community. Our road map for future releases revolves around the key themes of intelligent cloud ERP, AI integration, and sustainability.

Understanding new supply chain highlights

In the realm of supply chain, advanced shipping and receiving simplifies communication among such functions as transportation management, extended warehouse management, stock room management, inventory management, physical inventory, and logistics execution. The newly simplified transportation management and extended warehouse management integrations also support multiple warehouses within a single freight order. And they help you coordinate the whole process from the arrival of trucks at the gate to the final goods receipt in the warehouse. The supply creation-based (SBC) confirmation feature significantly enhances theavailability check in sales orders. It is typically used in manufacturing industries, especially in make-to-order and assemble-to-order scenarios when there is not enough stock in the warehouse to fill the order. Using SBC during the available-to-promise check, you can create supply elements for a multilevel bill of materials – with resource scheduling and reservations on capacities – to immediately cover the sales order requirements when there is not enough supply available in the system. Furthermore, the greenhouse gas emission feature lets you set thresholds for CO2 emissions per vehicle type to foster optimization and provide insights into sustainability

Recently delivered with SAP Cloud ERP Private 2023 FPS03 and enhanced with 2025 FPS0 is Interactive Backorder Processing (IBOP), which allows you to modify the confirmations of requirements based on business needs. For instance, during an unplanned supply shortage, scheduled BOP runs might be too late to address the issue and redistribute confirmations. In such cases, IBOP allows you to manually adjust or redistribute confirmations for selected requirements to meet business needs. See Figure 1 for a sample of managing confirmations of backorders.

Understanding new service highlights

In theservicerealm, the new service with advanced execution helps you plan, execute, and bill services for complex assets or long-running services with multiple billing cycles. It supports service processes with longer service cycles and complex technical projects that require extensive planning and execution.

The core characteristic of this service is the integration of the commercial aspects of service with the planning and execution capabilities of maintenance management. The enhancement of maintenance management lets you use the task list you’re familiar with from the plant maintenance module of SAP ERP and SAP Cloud ERP Private to represent complex maintenance operations and activities for such assets as industrial equipment and pieces of machinery.

Additionally, you can implement a cost-plus commercial arrangement, in which the end customer is charged for a service based on the actual cost of activities plus a surplus or margin on top, as with dynamic item processing or resource-related billing.

We also introduced new item-based accounting to deal with revenues and costs for service processes. This feature offers you an opportunity for real-time margin analysis before month-end financial closing and revenue recognition, based on enhanced event-based revenue recognition.

A major change in In-House Repair is the ability to adjust to the customers' individual requirements while offering comprehensive and transparent processes for the in-house service business—integrating field service and in-house repair within a single service order. Key features include strong logistics management for transporting repair objects, enhanced quotation and requote capabilities, and user-friendly apps to streamline daily operations for service managers and technicians. The solution delivers full transparency from quotation through execution to billing, supported by graphical transaction histories and real-time profitability and margin analysis.

Understanding new asset management highlights

In asset management, we’ve delivered many innovations to help close the gap between asset strategy and asset execution. The SAP Asset Performance Management application provides asset health insights from operational data and analytics and helps you craft cost-effective asset performance strategies for various asset classes. SAP Asset Performance Management and SAP S/4HANA work as a single system, so you can now carry strategic insights directly into actual maintenance execution. Your maintenance teams can now carry out various maintenance strategies appropriate for the criticality and class of the asset. And they can optimize reliability and maintenance costs and measure the efficiency and effectiveness of maintenance programs for continuous improvement. SAP Fiori apps help improve how you manage inspection checklists and maintenance orders to streamline the inspection process. This reduces manual effort and increases transparency by digitizing the visual and functional inspection process.

Understanding new sales highlights

To enhance sales functions, we’ve added many innovations to help you automate sales order processes and make them more intelligent and efficient. Low-touch sales order processing increases the sales team’s efficiency and productivity.

A key new feature is the automatic creation of sales orders from unstructured data, such as purchase orders in PDF or image formats. It works in conjunction with SAP Cloud ERP Private, the SAP Build solution, and the Document Information Extraction service, part of SAP AI Services. Sales representatives can import documents in XLSX format from Microsoft Excel to create sales orders, sales quotations, sales contracts, or scheduling agreements.

Additionally, the new advanced intercompany sales process allows two affiliated companies to participate in a single intercompany process, as when a local sales office sells to a customer and the producing company delivers the goods directly to the customer, or a local sales organization sells to a customer and a central warehouse delivers the goods. Figure 2 illustrates an example of the process flow in intercompany sales.

The One-Step Paymentfeature allows businesses to collect payments before their teams create the sales order or delivery, improving cash flow and simplifying the sales process. With the SAP digital payments add-on, payments are initiated directly through the payment service provider (PSP), such as in a Web shop, and payment details are transferred directly into the sales and finance applications. This streamlines the settlement process, ensuring a smooth match between the payment and the liability. It also allows businesses to handle refunds through credit memos when necessary, accelerating digital payments and reducing the time it takes for customers to pay before goods are shipped.

Understanding new finance highlights

In finance, SAP has supported parallel accounting for some time, initially using parallel accounts and later parallel ledgers. However, these solutions had some shortcomings, since currencies and ledgers were not consistently supported across the material ledger and controlling and asset accounting functions. Now a new system for universal parallel accounting (UPA) provides a harmonized architecture for ledgers and currencies, offering a foundation for calculating and posting values per ledger and currency along end-to-end processes. UPA is also the baseline for future innovations in finance, such as value chain analysis and transactional carbon accounting. We guide our customers in their UPA adoption to ensure the prerequisites for using UPA are fulfilled.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enhance the integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud for group reporting, the SAP Advanced Financial Closingsolution, and the SAP Analytics Cloud solution to accelerate digital transformation in finance.

The integration of SAP Cloud ERP Private and SAP Taulia solutions ensures straight-through processing, minimizing manual intervention and accelerating the flow of funds. With the SAP Taulia Payables solution, you can make early payments to your suppliers using various financing types provided by SAP Taulia, such as supply chain financing, dynamic discounting and virtual cards. This improves your cash flow while providing your suppliers with enhanced liquidity. The SAP Taulia Receivables solution allows you to get immediate cash by selling your outstanding receivables to a third party, known as the funder. With the integration of both products, you gain access to multiple funders and financing options, helping you improve working capital velocity and unlock investment capacity for growth.

Understanding new manufacturing highlight

In manufacturing, we have made improvements to the material requirements planning (MRP) functionality for “MRP Live,” predictive MRP, demand-driven MRP, and collaborative MRP. “MRP Live” provides significant performance improvements, including planning cycles shortened to run multiple times a day and cross-plant planning. Up-to-date supply and demand information provides the basis for smarter decisions that match demand and supply more efficiently and serves as the foundation for predictive MRP. Predictive MRP helps you leverage capacity planning to predict and simulate capacity constraints based on current MRP results, resolving potential capacity and material gaps in a plant before they occur. Demand-driven MRP helps buffer inventory based on target levels in strategic locations, with replenishment triggered based on the average consumption over the lead time. Collaborative MRP lets you run MRP passes in real time and visualize results, identifying potential material bottlenecks and using simulations to investigate ways to resolve them. You can also collaborate with suppliers on short-notice changes and receive instant feedback through the SAP Business Network for Procurement.

Other MRP types control consumption-based planning through parameters for qualified demand, qualified supply, safety stock, lot size, and reorder point.

Understanding new sourcing and procurement highlights

In recent releases, we’ve also made many investments in central procurement and product sourcing, and introduced a concept called lean services. You can now integrate the lean service for purchasing—a simplified process in operational procurement to manage the purchase of planned and unplanned external services—through networks in the project management system of the component product lifecycle. See Lean Service Enablement for Project Networks in the SAP Community for further details. The migration from previous use of MM-SRV (external services management within the materials management module) to lean services is supported for master data and transactional data using migration reports.

Understanding the benefits of sustainability: SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management and SAP S/4HANA for product compliance

The SAP Cloud ERP Private 2025 release delivers major functional advancements in both the SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management (SAP EHS Management) solution and SAP S/4HANA for product compliance solution, strengthening your organization's ability to manage operational risk, regulatory obligations, and product-related compliance at scale.

SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management

In SAP EHS Management, a new overview page shows exceedances, warnings, and missing data from the last six months, with configurable SAP Fiori tiles for fast access.

Standard core data services (CDS)-views-based analytical content with a live SAP Analytics Cloud connection delivers task and trend dashboards on compliance data to speed investigation and action.

Waste management, which covers waste from generation through storage, transport, and disposal, is now integrated with core purchasing.

Users can assign purchase orders to disposal channels and related transport documents, view disposal and transport costs, and attribute them to specific production locations.

Workplace Safety, Occupational Health—previously an add-on in SAP EHS Management —is now part of the standard solution, with no separate license.

A central repository tracks employee health history and case management, and a risk-based process integrates with core HR data for complete visibility.

SAP EHS Management also integrates with the SAP SuccessFactors Learning solution to trigger, assign, notify, and track training from incidents and risk assessments, ensuring timely, targeted completion.

SAP S/4HANA for product compliance

Product compliance capabilities receive significant upgrades across regulatory content delivery, dangerous goods management, and the management of safety data sheets.

With the 2025 release, continuous regulatory updates are now delivered through the Regulatory Content Service.

This decouples regulatory updates from software releases, allowing you to remain up to date with the latest compliance requirements without waiting for a new release.

In dangerous goods management, the new release introduces clearer visualization of ADR/RID 1.1.3.6 exemptions, broader support for required transport documents, automated mixed-loading checks integrated in logistic processes, and compliant printing of dangerous goods freight documentation.

These features give you immediate visibility into transport permission of dangerous goods and help ensure compliance with mix-loading rules, thanks to integrated controls from sales to final transport execution. You can also generate legally required dangerous goods transport documents and directly populate relevant information in standard freight documents.

Lastly, enhancements to safety data sheet management include support for multi-component products and branded products in the processes.

The new features provide the ability to send safety data sheets for multiple components of a product at the same time and manage safety data sheet distribution at the branded-product level. This helps ensure you deliver complete and accurate safety information to your customers without redundancy.

Together, these capabilities expand automation, reduce operational burden, and strengthen end-to-end compliance for your product portfolio.

Enhancing the user interface to boost productivity and flexibility

Regular upgrades also allow you to boost user productivity by modernizing the user experience (UX). Each SAP Cloud ERP Private release introduces approximately 300 new apps in the SAP Fiori user experience to support improvements in processes, intelligent use cases, UX features, usability, and performance. You can simplify change management for your business users through the context-sensitive help tutorials, in-app guided tours, and terminology explanations that come with each release. And you can optionally refine this content using the SAP Enable Now solution. For your support team, improvements in tooling and extension capabilities for clean core initiatives simplify and reduce the effort of launchpad administration with each update.

Overall, SAP Fiori allows you to gain productivity, reduce training costs and user errors, and improve time to value for your business processes compared to classic user interfaces built using SAP GUI for HTML and ABAP Web Dynpro.

Considering your specific UX issues

When you begin your upgrade, consider where user experience shortcomings in your system (navigation, performance, layouts, and so on) lower productivity. This will help you identify opportunities for SAP Fiori-based improvements. Use the SAP Activate methodology for UX adoption planning to get started. For example, use the UX Adoption Workshop: UX Strategy and Guiding Principles to review improvements in cross-functional features that benefit all users. Then use the User Experience tag to find other UX adoption accelerators and discuss new or successor apps and new AI-assisted features that will improve your fit evaluation practices, layouts, and navigation design.

Tallying UX improvements from recent SAP Cloud ERP Private releases

The following list summarizes some of the latest changes to SAP Fiori:

• AI-assisted features. We’ve made the Joule copilot—your digital assistant—available for informational, navigational, and transactional use cases. You can access embedded AI use cases and agentic use cases with Joule. These include your custom use cases designed in Joule Studio. To make sure you’re ready, read this blog.
• We will make upcoming AI-assisted features available across a broad range of apps in upcoming SAP Cloud ERP Private feature pack stacks, such as easy filter, smart summarization, and document AI in the SAP Mobile Start app—with many more to come—as discussed in this blog.
• The unified side navigation bar means your favorite apps, pages, and all your spaces are available wherever you are. There’s no need to return to My Home as shown in SAP User Experience Update.
• The My Home page introduced with SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01 has been further improved,  as illustrated in Figure 3 in the SAP User Experience Update.
• Sharing to Microsoft Teams now includes to-dos and adaptive cards, and you can chat to Microsoft Copilot through Joule, as detailed in the SAP User Experience Update.
• Spaces and pages help you make sense of your business using a hierarchy with multiple tile types, personalized sorting through pinned spaces, and merging of spaces and pages for users in multiple business roles, as discussed in Getting Started with Spaces and Pages and Merging Spaces and Pages.
• Sharing spaces and pages across composite roles is fully supported, with unauthorized tiles automatically hidden, along with automatic hiding of empty sections, pages, and spaces. For more on composite security roles in launchpad content and layout tools—including exposure of composite roles to SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition—refer to SAP Fiori - Composite Roles in launchpad content and layout tools
• We’ve made several improvements for situation handling—including the addition of nine more use cases, to make a total of 133—in SAP Cloud ERP Private 2025 FPS0, and the solution now supports extended situations, including custom situations, in My Home To-Dos. For custom situations, refer to these two blogs: How to Start with Custom Situations and Custom Situation Cases: Configure Your Own Use Cases.
• We’ve added more review booklets—the latest embedded analytical app type—such as the Cost Center Review Booklet. Look out for more news on review booklets with SAP Cloud ERP Private FPS1/FPS2, with the review booklet designer and AI-assisted.
• You can find role-based launchpad configuration parameters to tailor client settings, such as System Information Bars, to suit different roles. Read more in the SAP Fiori launchpad administration guide on the SAP Help portal: Setting Parameters per Profile.
• There’s more support for key users with guided tours for the Adapt UI feature and many new options for adjusting table behaviors, such as scrolling volume and text/id arrangement, as discussed in SAP User Experience Update.
• You’ll find read-only review tools for sharing launchpad content and layout details with your audit team and other business stakeholders, as detailed in SAP Fiori  – 3 simple use cases for Launchpad Content Aggregator and SAP Fiori – Upgrade Faster - More use cases for Launchpad Content Aggregator

The 2025 release brings several improvements in My Home, the start page in the SAP Fiori launchpad. It also includes some improvements in the launchpad itself for users and administrators, beyond general design updates. Get more details of the enhancements in this blog.

Enhancing apps usage

With each upgrade, you benefit from improvements applied to your current usage of SAP Fiori apps, including performance enhancements to application floorplan behaviors, underlying data extraction by means of CDS views and virtual data models, and Web browser rendering through the SAPUI5 framework. With many releases, new SAP Fiori launchpad configuration options let you centrally control “every user” features that affect performance.

Other examples of benefits from upgrading include enabling more SAP Fiori apps to take advantage of OData V4 services, which provide enhanced performance through such features as lazy loading. You also gain tighter metadata compression that saves from 10% to 60% of your data volume, as well as advanced querying, sorting, and filter mechanisms and support for multi-level expands, which reduce the number of calls and the data volume being transferred.

The SAPUI5 framework, which is the technology that implements SAP Fiori apps, has been steadily evolving. It now offers, for example, features in browser development such as support for modern ECMAScript that enables applications to run faster and to embrace emerging Web standards. In recent releases, and particularly with SAPUI5 1.120 – the SAPUI5 version for SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS01 and higher – a significant number of improvements have been introduced. You can find notes on these and many more in the SAPUI5 What’s New Viewer. For architects and developers, Best Practices for Developers in the SAPUI5 Demo Kit offers practical guidance to keep custom-built applications future-proof.

If you are running an older release of SAP S/4HANA and using SAP Fiori, performance and stability problems may be related to known issues in the performance of individual apps. Those have likely been resolved in current releases of SAP Fiori. For more information on the kinds of issues that you might face and how to avoid them, see SAP community blogs such as SAP Fiori Peak Performance – Introduction and Top 10 Ways to Prevent Performance Issues.

If you are running a lower release than SAP S/4HANA 2020, use the upgrade as an opportunity to also declutter user SAP Fiori launchpads and shorten loading times to gain benefits in performance and stability. Check the blog post about recommendations regarding structuring roles, spaces and pages in the SAP Fiori Launchpad based on common user behaviors.

Phasing out the use of a hub server for SAP Fiori

Lastly, if you’ve deployed your SAP Fiori landscape initially on a hub or “stand-alone” server, we highly recommend you move to an embedded deployment with your next upgrade. SAP Fiori front-end server 2023 is the last SAP Fiori front-end server version that can be used stand-alone. Embedded deployment has been recommended since 2017 for SAP S/4HANA, and stand-alone deployment will no longer be supported from SAP Cloud ERP Private 2025 on.

One of the core benefits of the embedded deployment is a measurable performance improvement through removal of RFC overhead between the front- and back-end systems for service calls. This brings you better stability and reduced IT landscape costs, since there are fewer systems for your basis teams to manage. For more details, see SAP Fiori Deployment Options and System Landscape Recommendations and Migrate SAP Fiori Front-End Server from Stand-Alone to Embedded System Deployment.

Extending benefits to other GUIs

The improvements in performance and stability for SAP Fiori also apply to classic user interfaces built using SAP GUI for HTML and ABAP Web Dynpro. Improvements for these technologies and frameworks through SAP kernel and unified rendering patches directly benefit you even if you retain SAP GUI as your primary user interface.

Innovating with SAP business technology platform

If you subscribe to the SAP Cloud ERP Private package, you benefit from AI-powered application development and automation capabilities included with SAP Build, part of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). SAP Build allows you to extend and personalize your cloud ERP environment while following clean core best practices. SAP BTP also provides mission-critical integration and platform and AI foundation services across SAP and non-SAP systems—keeping your cloud ERP agile, connected, and resilient.

Key examples include:

• SAP Build to create AI-powered extensions and automations following clean core best practices
• SAP Integration Suite to connect SAP Cloud ERP to SAP and non-SAP applications, as described at Integration Suite with Clean Core
• SAP BTP Platform Services for SAP Cloud ERP basic functions like access and authorizations, explained at SAP BTP Platform Overview
• AI Foundation in SAP BTP as the foundation for managing your Joule-based AI solutions across SAP applications
• The launchpad for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition,will provide a unified entry point, as explained in What Is SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition?
• The SAP Task Center service is a unified approvals inbox, as described in the SAP Task Center one-page summary

Streamlining business processes with Joule, Joule agents, and SAP business AI

The rise of generative AI marks a new era beyond simple machine language technology. AI-assisted processes and user experience in SAP Cloud ERP Private are paving the way to a new world of accelerated business, faster decision-making, and exponentially greater productivity. Regular upgrades of your SAP solutions ensure that you can always leverage the latest AI innovations.

Harnessing Joule, the AI copilot from SAP

Joule provides data-driven answers drawn from your wealth of underlying SAP business data, preserving business context while guarding customer privacy. Across all lines of business in your SAP Cloud ERP Private, Joule helps your users to work faster, get instant insights, and achieve better outcomes by simply asking questions or telling the system what to do in natural language. The copilot helps them:

• Revolutionize each interaction, simplify every task, and make every touchpoint count
• Lead more productive business interactions using natural language for informational, navigational, and transactional assistance
• Gain smarter insights grounded in underlying business data and enriched by business context

For details on how to access and activate Joule, see the note on Joule - A Comprehensive Setup Guide on the SAP Community website.

To get an overview across the transactional and navigational capabilities of Joule for SAP Cloud ERP Private by role, see this note and our user assistance for Joule.

Furthermore, Joule coordinates multi-agent systems. An AI agent can autonomously plan, reason, access external tools, work with other agents, and iteratively reflect on progress until it achieves its objective. Imagine a dispute management AI agent resolving complex cases, or a maintenance planner AI agent avoiding disruptions by analyzing real-time data, recommending schedule updates, and streamlining planning.

You can get an overview of AI agents across SAP’s cloud portfolio in SAP’s Discovery Center.

Furthering growth and innovation with AI

Our customers get the most value-adding AI use cases out of the box since SAP does all the heavy lifting. An embedded AI feature means it’s an integral part of our standard business application—customers need only activate, consume, and benefit. SAP’s suite-first and AI-first product strategy means that we will rethink entire end-to-end processes and applications around AI. The productivity gains of embedded AI will exceed the value of individual use cases as we leverage synergies across our portfolio. To keep this pace, we deliver AI innovations only in the cloud. The cloud provides advanced computing, secure model access, predictable data models, and regular innovation cycles required for AI.

In 2024, we released many embedded SAP Business AI features using generative AI or SAP Business AI services (like document extraction and personalized recommendations) with SAP Cloud ERP Private 2023 FPS2. These include sales order fulfillment monitoring, intelligent goods receipt processing, and the ability to carry out planning operations in the transportation cockpit.

In 2025, we delivered embedded SAP Business AI features with SAP Cloud ERP Private 2023 FPS3, such as maintenance order recommendations and in-house services initiation from paper-based documents.

For details on SAP Business AI features for SAP Cloud ERP, see the sections on artificial intelligence in 2023 FPS2, 2023 FPS3, and 2025 FPS0.

You can also review additional insights into all SAP Business AI features in SAP’s Discovery Center.

Fostering security and compliance

Deliveries of SAP software do more than provide new functionality and enhancements. They also include the latest security updates on all levels, including authentication and authorization corrections. But SAP guarantees security corrections only for feature and support package stacks dated within the last two years. So to avoid security-related issues, you should run on a feature or support package no older than two years. Additionally, new security features are typically shipped in the latest versions only. For example, SAP introduced OpenID Connect support with the SAP S/4HANA 2021 release, and Transport Layer Security 1.3 from SAP S/4HANA 2023 on.

Promoting database-level security

Security plays a role not only at the product level but also regarding the underlying database, which you should keep current with regular updates. For the SAP HANA database, SAP introduced more secure integration features, such as the SAP Data Custodian Key Management Service with SAP HANA 2.0 SP06, and this solution has since been replaced by the SAP Key Management Service. Transport Layer Security 1.3 was also introduced with HANA2 SP08.

Keeping current with updates is also critical for staying compliant with country and industry regulations for such functions as tax reporting, statutory reporting, and interactions between business and government. SAP adds features related to those areas and requirements with every shipment.

Replacing compatibility scope functionality

SAP provides limited use rights for certain classic SAP ERP functionalities in SAP S/4HANA on premises and in the private cloud. Refer to SAP note 2269324 for the terms and conditions of compatibility packages. With release 2023 of SAP S/4HANA, SAP has shipped go-to solutions as replacements for the compatibility packs, many of which are non-disruptive. SAP strongly recommends that you investigate your compatibility scope usage and the appropriate substitutes right away, so that you can bring the go-to solutions live before use rights expire.

For an introduction to the topic, follow us on YouTube:

• Call to Action: Compatibility Packs - YouTube
• Compatibility Packs: the Way Forward in Detail💫 - YouTube

And our central blogs Compatibility Scope: What Happens after 2025/2030 and SAP Note 2269324 provide further details

Increasing performance and stability

End user expectations have increased rapidly over recent years, and you rightly demand optimal performance from today’s systems, since they must be prepared to meet the high scalability requirements of modern business. From every release of SAP Cloud ERP Private, as users start to use functionality at scale, SAP learns which applications have performance considerations and tunes them to address issues as they surface. Performing an upgrade means that you don’t need to live with known performance limitations. It also means that the latest lessons SAP has learned in terms of our frameworks and programming models are always applied to your system, giving you the best performance possible.

In general, the applications mentioned in the SAP Note regarding known performance limitations show higher than expected response times in terms of SAP HANA CPU time and application server CPU time. The resolution of these issues is available with further SAP Cloud ERP Private feature packs – a tangible benefit to performing regular system updates.

Also included with each release are performance tuning and improvements for the SAP HANA database as outlined in SAP Notes such as 2689405 – FAQ: Performance Best Practices - Collective SAP Note. Improvements such as new parameters and enhancements help you improve the response times of your business processes from end to end.

New releases bring not only new features but also innovations that help manage performance. And systems that are updated regularly are easier to support, enabling much shorter ticket resolution times in dealings with the SAP Customer Support organization.

Forming a habit of regular upgrades

Upgrading regularly makes planning and executing each upgrade much easier. We recommend making regular upgrades every two years, an integral part of your IT calendar, to eliminate the effort of planning and budgeting each upgrade separately.

Our analysis of customer upgrade behavior shows that regular upgrades correlate with shorter project durations. Customers who maintain a consistent upgrade rhythm complete their projects faster on average than those who upgrade less frequently.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the positive effects of regular upgrades on the experience, knowledge, and skills of your IT team. Regularly upgrading your systems equips your team with solid know-how for the upgrade process itself. They become more skilled at engaging with SAP for technical upgrades, creating the project plan, engaging with your business users for testing, reviewing innovation adoption, and so on. Naturally, this results in smoother upgrade projects, and in fact customers who upgrade regularly tell us about fewer disruptions in their projects. Training for regular upgrades is like training a muscle for sports: repeated exercise leads to better performance.

Furthermore, testing represents about 50% of project costs during an upgrade, so when you can re-use test plans and automate your testing, you can enormously reduce testing efforts and project costs.

Increasing business value through regular upgrades

Upgrading an ERP system requires significant investments in time, effort, and cost. While each company's specific circumstances vary, the decision to upgrade or replace a system always hinges on a compelling business case. IT organizations need to justify such investments to secure the required resources, so they must quantify the benefits of regular updates and upgrades. In the case of single updates or upgrades, some organizations integrate them into broader modernization plans, but this approach is not suitable for driving regular updates and upgrades independent from evolving business situations. SAP can help you build a financial business case for regular updates and upgrades that are tailored to your organization. Just reach out to your account executive or customer success partner to discuss available services.

At a high level, your most important source of value is the ability of your business to accelerate the consumption of innovations – or rather recoup the opportunity cost of missing out on innovations. SAP invests over US$6 billion in R&D every year, and a substantial part of that goes into developments related to SAP S/4HANA. This investment shows up in the number of standard innovations made available to our customers every year. If you don’t upgrade regularly, you’re losing out on the value these innovations can incrementally bring to your business, as shown in Figure 4. Even worse, you may waste money developing and maintaining custom code for business processes or features that can be addressed by SAP standard functionality in newer releases.

A great example of an SAP customer who leverages the power of regular upgrades is Hitachi High-Tech. By adopting SAP Cloud ERP Private and following a clean core approach, they have changed their routine to upgrading every two years and updating with the latest features and support packages yearly. They’ve since managed to reduce the duration of a typical upgrade project to a single month.

Building your regular upgrade routine

The path to regular upgrades starts with the right strategy, governance, and planning. In this section, we provide high-level guidance on these aspects, followed by recommendations for building update and upgrade skills in your organization and step-by-step procedures for update and upgrade projects.

Establishing robust governance and planning

To establish a regular update and upgrade routine, you need the right governance and planning. Make updates and upgrades an integral part of your planning cycles by following the steps in this section.

Understanding the release strategy behind SAP products

Each SAP product follows its own release strategy. Staying updated on product releases and release strategies is crucial, since it helps determine when specific functionalities will be available and which time of the year is most suitable for particular system upgrades or updates.

For SAP Cloud ERP Private, SAP established a yearly delivery of new releases with two feature packages in between with the launch of SAP S/4HANA in 2015. Through 2022, SAP delivered nine SAP S/4HANA releases with numerous innovations and simplifications. With the release of SAP S/4HANA 2023, we reached the next level of product maturity by completing compatibility package alternatives and concluding major overhauls. At this point, SAP decided to take the next evolutionary step in its release strategy. Since SAP S/4HANA 2023, new releases are delivered every second year, with three feature packages in between. Along with this change in release frequency, illustrated in Figure 5, SAP extended the mainstream maintenance period from five to seven years from SAP S/4HANA 2023 on.

You can take advantage of the transparency and regularity of SAP’s release schedule to align your IT change management and business release strategy, as well as your project schedule, with SAP Cloud ERP Private release timelines.

The two-year release cycle comes with an extended period of easier-to-consume innovation made available through feature packages. Feature package updates usually have shorter project durations and less complexity than release upgrades, since essential technology components such as the ABAP platform, UI5 technology versions, and the SAP HANA database remain stable in feature packages. Moreover, with feature package updates you typically don’t need to update or upgrade software add-ons.

On the application level, SAP strives for a minimally disruptive approach, avoiding impact on Day 1 whenever possible. For example, technical objects such as transactions, SAP Fiori apps, APIs, or CDS views are not removed or made unavailable with feature packages. This happens only with major releases and after the constraints have been announced at least one year ahead of time. In order not to miss out on such announcements, please regularly check for deprecation announcements with new feature packages and releases in the SAP What’s New Viewer.

For any changes that do require your attention in an update project, SAP uses well-established approaches such as “simplification item” checks or silent data migration to prevent business disruptions. We made the Software Update Manager (SUM) tool mandatory for feature package updates as of SAP S/4HANA 2023 FPS02 to make sure you don’t miss out on using these aids.

Designating a fixed time period for upgrades

Defining your timeline for an upgrade or update is key, especially since this activity can take a few months. You’ll need to choose a substantial period of time when resources are readily available and there are no other significant organizational commitments, such as quarter-end or year-end activities, or concurrent development projects.

The right upgrade frequency for your organization depends on a range of factors. From a legal perspective, your private cloud contract requires that you stay in mainstream maintenance with your SAP systems, which defines the maximum allowable range of time between upgrades. However, we strongly advise against waiting those seven years before moving to a new release, for all the reasons laid out earlier. SAP recommends you always run the latest release or at least only one below the latest. Many customers have already adopted this best practice and apply a two-year cycle for upgrading their system.

You might also consider decoupling technical upgrades from the implementation of new features. The main purpose of new software versions is to deliver innovations for business and technology. Therefore, we strongly recommend evaluating new functions, features, and technology enhancements for each new release and defining a clear road map for adopting all those innovations. From a project planning and execution perspective, it can be beneficial to implement the technical software upgrade and the business enhancements in separate projects with separate go-lives.

At first, this may sound contradictory and there may sometimes be good reasons to implement new applications or processes together with the technical upgrade. However, SAP Cloud ERP Private technical upgrades are well-defined procedures supported by robust tools and a high degree of automation. And the experience of many SAP customers shows that these upgrades can be accomplished quite fast – particularly if the IT team is well trained in performing upgrades. Functional implementations, on the other hand, are usually one-time events with customer-specific constraints that can lead to project delays. If functional implementation is part of an upgrade project, such issues may slow down the complete project and the overall upgrade. Therefore, as you begin to establish a routine of regular updates, you may want to consider separating technical upgrades from implementation of new functionalities. Then, if both projects run in parallel as much as possible – for example, the implementation project for new functionalities starts as soon as the development system has been upgraded – such an approach can ultimately even speed up innovation adoption.

Balancing upgrades with other projects

Frequently, upgrades get sidelined and delayed because other ongoing projects take precedence. This unfortunate trend can be reversed by publishing the benefits of the annual upgrade or update schedule across the organization. Once all stakeholders understand what the organization stands to gain by always running the latest release, they can more willingly accommodate the timeline for periodic upgrades and strategically plan projects to align with it. They also need to grasp how upgrades are coordinated through the use of a development freeze window and transport blocks.

Understanding dependencies across solutions

Assessing the ways in which the many solutions in your environment depend on one another is crucial to planning upgrades. A clear comprehension of cross-landscape dependencies helps you determine the proper sequence in which to upgrade your solutions.

The higher the criticality of the system to overall business continuity, the higher its priority for upgrading – or perhaps for leaving untouched. Certainly, upgrades and updates may also be prioritized to respond to functional or performance issues that need quick resolution.

Considering use of a sandbox

Evaluating the upgrade path for your landscape is essential before every system upgrade, since identifying top-priority landscape requirements can streamline the process. For instance, if your organization consistently engages in projects within the SAP S/4HANA system landscape, opting for an extra landscape tier for the SAP S/4HANA solution can support both business as usual and upgrade project activities. Similarly, if your release strategy includes a sandbox cycle for thorough testing but you don’t require a sandbox throughout the year, consider scheduling the acquisition of a temporary sandbox before the upgrade project begins.

Developing an overall upgrade road map for your IT environment

Best practice suggests developing a road map to detail the sequence and schedule for updates and upgrades across all solutions. By considering cross-landscape dependencies, the priority and complexity of existing solutions, and your requirements for custom projects, you can establish an annual calendar for these recurring activities. Staggering system upgrades throughout the year in a fixed sequence and maintaining a consistent schedule make the most sense.

Planning each system landscape upgrade in detail

Conducting thorough technical and functional evaluations for each system landscape upgrade or update is imperative. Meticulous planning and coordination among teams helps guarantee your ability to adhere to the yearly plan. It’s important to consider the issue of business downtime early in your upgrade planning. Depending on the size and nature of their business, organizations have varying tolerances for business downtime during updates and upgrades. You need to factor your organization's specific requirements in this regard into your planning.

Private cloud customers benefit from a range of preconfigured optimization measures for technical downtime. The near-zero downtime maintenance approach is applied by default for SAP Cloud ERP Private upgrades. To optimize business downtime beyond the technical downtime, try selecting individual solutions to automate and parallelize IT administrative tasks and testing. Services available from SAP and SAP partners can help.

Using helpful tools and guidance from SAP

Leverage SAP's Clean Core Principles

Historically, companies have relied on ERP system flexibility to develop tailored extensions to address specific business needs. However, the enhanced capabilities of the latest SAP Cloud ERP Private release may now render many of these historical customizations unnecessary or allow them to be replaced by simpler extensions that integrate smoothly with current standard business processes. By developing new extensions or modernizing existing ones in line with clean core principles, organizations can accelerate upgrades and the adoption of new feature packs. Refer to SAP's clean core principles, illustrated in Figure 6.

For SAP customers looking to modernize their ERP with a clean core approach, the RISE with SAP Methodology provides comprehensive best practices guidance for their transformation journey. Establishing a clean core success plan and ensuring its adherence are integral elements of the quality gate process at the conclusion of each key phase in the project roadmap.

Extensions that are newly developed or modernized according to clean core principles are not only upgradable but also maintain agility to incorporate the latest innovations, ultimately saving time and resources.

SAP’s evolved clean core extensibility modelsupports this by:

1. Decoupling extensions from the core through a modular, cloud-first architecture
2. Providing a platform for innovation through SAP BTP, released APIs, and embedded AI
3. Ensuring extensibility is strategic, not excessive—and is focused on true differentiation

To maintain upgrade stability, organizations should follow SAP’s extensibility hierarchy to:

1. Adopt a BTP-first mindset using SAP Build for custom logic and integrations
2. Prefer Level A/B extensions using released or classic APIs
3. Use Level C only when unavoidable and track changes carefully
4. Eliminate Level D modifications and refactor legacy code.

Maintaining a clean core is ongoing. The RISE with SAP Methodology incorporates the Clean Core Measurement Framework, enabling organizations to assess maturity, define target actions, and track adherence through clean core KPIs surfaced in the methodology dashboard.

Click here for more information on the ERP clean core strategy.

Streamline upgrade projects with SAP Activate

The SAP Activate for SAP Cloud ERP Private – Upgrade is a structured framework designed to simplify and accelerate your upgrade projects. Building on the proven SAP Activate methodology for implementing SAP solutions, it guides you through each phase by prompting the right deliverables and tasks at the right time. With pre-built content, standardized approaches, and integrated tools and services, SAP Activate minimizes risks, optimizes project timelines, and ensures a smoother, faster upgrade journey.

See the Upgrade Step-by-Step section for details and key tasks involved in planning and executing an upgrade.

Using SAP Readiness Check to reduce upgrade complexity

The SAP Readiness Check, discussed in SAP Community, provides a self-service method for checking the readiness of your existing system for an upgrade to a selected target release, including feature package stack or support package stack. The tool gives you an indication of the required effort to get ready and to complete the upgrade. SAP Readiness Check is available for customers with an active SAP maintenance contract and is accessible through the SAP for Me portal or through the SAP Cloud ALM solution.

SAP Readiness Check helps you perform a set of functional and technical assessments to scope and plan an upgrade project. The analysis helps identify areas of focus as early as possible, to avoid hidden project risks and preserve the planned budget and timeline. You can identify mandatory preparatory steps and possible adjustments for your system well before the upgrade project starts. There could be, for example, simplification items requiring attention, impacted interfaces needing remediation, or deprecated or unavailable applications requiring the adoption of a successor. This early insight means that you can scope your upgrade project with a higher degree of accuracy.

We recommend running SAP Readiness Check for upgrades in your production system during the Discover phase or early in the Prepare phase of the SAP Activate methodology for project planning, which we discuss in detail later in this document. The dashboard view pictured in Figure 7 helps you identify the impact of planned changes on your business processes, so you have sufficient time to address it proactively.

The following checks are available in the SAP Readiness Check for upgrades:

• Simplification items
  As with the conversion from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA, in which you had to deal with many simplification items to prepare for the project, the current maintenance strategy includes a few simplification items with every release and feature package of SAP Cloud ERP Private. Every feature package renews various modules and processes, resulting in a small number of new simplification items. SAP Readiness Check shows you relevant simplification items based on your source and target release, including the feature package stack.
• Compatibility scope analysis
  The compatibility scope analysis highlights the compatibility packages you use to help you plan the migration to successor solutions before the compatibility package usage rights expire. There are different expiry dates depending on whether you operate under a cloud subscription or not. Check your contract to determine the applicable dates. This is carefully explained in SAP Note 2269324 - Compatibility Scope Matrix for SAP S/4HANA
• App availability
  Before you start an upgrade, you should validate the availability of UI elements used in the target SAP Cloud ERP Private release. Leveraging the SAP Fiori Upgrade Impact Analysis in the accelerator section of the SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library and based on system usage statistics, this check identifies apps that use technology types SAP GUI, SAP Fiori, and Web Dynpro in the source system, as shown in Figure 8.

• Recommended SAP Fiori apps
  In this section, you can find SAP Fiori apps that have been identified as beneficial for your target system based on the business processes and transactions already present. For an overview of available apps, see the Product Tour. This document highlights many apps that provide immediate business benefits to a range of popular functional areas. The SAP Signavio Process Navigator solution and the SAP Signavio Process Insights solution provide detailed recommendations for apps that align with your line-of-business processes.
• Custom code analysis
  The custom code analysis in SAP Readiness Check for upgrades supports the baseline analysis feature available within the ABAP test cockpit. The readiness check compares the baseline analysis of the as-is system to the target system and then leverages it in a subsequent run of the ABAP test cockpit to exclude any findings from a previous SAP ERP conversion or upgrade project. A sample of the resulting report appears in Figure 9.

• Add-on compatibility
  Incompatible add-ons can be showstoppers for your upgrade. Upgrades to standard SAP add-ons are delivered as part of the SAP Cloud ERP Private release. Any add-ons installed in the source system that are not yet supported in the target release will be shown as incompatible. If any third-party software present in the landscape requires an update as part of the upgrade, you may need to contact your third-party vendor to check on the status and expected delivery date for an update.
• Integration
  This section of the readiness check provides a list of interfaces you use, automates otherwise tedious analysis, cross-checks with various data sources, and identifies interfaces that may no longer function as expected following the upgrade between SAP releases.

The upgrade solutions developed by the SAP Innovative Business Solutions organization need to be checked for compatibility with your target release and maintenance contract.

Additional features of SAP Readiness Check include business case story cards, which highlight the innovation potential in your specific system. This assessment is based on quantitative characteristics derived from the performance of your business processes. If the quantitative characteristics exceed a defined threshold, the corresponding card is active, and you can open it to find information about the system's current situation and the identified innovation potential.

The “Learn More” side panel in SAP Readiness Check provides information and possible next steps for each check. A Web assistant helps you navigate the dashboard and use features such as downloading the SAP Readiness Check results.

Visit us online for more information on SAP Readiness Check. To stay informed on new and updated capabilities, join our SAP Readiness Check Community.

Upgrade planning using Release Upgrade Management

The Release Upgrade Management application assists customers in planning and coordinating their upgrade project by consolidating major tasks, such as:

• Automatically determining the required OS/DB versions based on the leading product version
• Identifying the upgrade path based on the given number of tiers in the solution landscape
• Allowing customers to specify the connected agents (such as the SAP Web Dispatcher and SAP Cloud Connector SAP Analytics Cloud Agent) and guiding them through the recommended update or upgrade versions
• Providing a high-level project timeline based on the production system upgrade or go-live date
• Generating the consolidated list of all service requests to be created as part of the end-to-end upgrade project
• Managing upgrade tasks during each upgrade cycle
• Monitoring the technical upgrade progress

For the latest information about the Release Upgrade Management application, see SAP Note 3372118.

If you have an SAP system landscape consisting, for example, of a production system, a quality assurance system, and a development system, you must consider the entire system group regarding the sequence of updates.

In addition, the update procedure influences your development activities; for example, dual maintenance might be temporarily necessary to ensure that your production system is supported with emergency corrections.

Managing updates and upgrades with SAP Cloud ALM

SAP Cloud ALM helps you effectively manage upgrades throughout their entire lifecycle. It offers project planning, testing, change management, and end-to-end monitoring functionality. SAP Cloud ALM leverages best practices and expert guidance to ensure seamless, efficient, and successful upgrades. It also supports continuous improvement and innovation by empowering you to monitor performance, quickly identify and resolve issues, and continuously optimize your applications after upgrading.

Customers with a provisioned tenant for SAP Cloud ALM can generate and view their SAP Readiness Check results within their tenant. When you use SAP Readiness Check with SAP Cloud ALM, we offer enhanced task integration with project management through the integration app for SAP Readiness Check. This feature lets you generate new follow-ups in the form of requirements or user stories and add existing follow-ups to your SAP Readiness Check findings. You can then manage follow-ups within your SAP Cloud ALM project.

For more information on SAP Cloud ALM, please see its value proposition and overview video.

Staying confident with SAP S/4HANA Cloud safekeeper

SAP provides a transparent release strategy with defined maintenance end dates. But we realize that in today’s challenging business environment, you simply might not be able to upgrade your system before the end of mainstream maintenance (and extended maintenance, if provided), despite thorough planning. After the defined maintenance end dates, SAP no longer provides technological or legal updates. Your system is under so-called customer-specific maintenance, which means you must assume the responsibility for keeping the system secure and compliant. Please see SAP Note 52505 for more information about this requirement.

As a unique offering for private cloud customers, SAP offers the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Safekeeper service helps you mitigate limitations of customer-specific maintenance. This offering is intended to help you transition your system to the latest release of SAP Cloud ERP Private when your mainstream or extended maintenance period has ended.

There are some changes related to the maintenance end dates that need to be considered from a security perspective. SAP publishes security notes on the second Tuesday of every month, the “Security Patch Day.” These notes typically provide security corrections for issues reported by external sources. Releases going into customer-specific maintenance will be considered only in the first 12 months for notes with high priority. Please see SAP Note 3053725 - Security Corrections in Customer Specific Maintenance for details.

The safekeeper service contains a cloud application service or an enhanced operations service, as well as a sandbox system for the transition to a later release under full maintenance by SAP. The term for subscription to the service is a maximum of 27 months (except for SAP S/4HANA releases 1503 and 1605 which can be covered for up to 48 months). During the transition time, security and legal patches are provided for your production system.

For more information on the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Safekeeper, please see SAP Note 3424346 - SAP S/4HANA Cloud Safekeeper - Description of maintenance-related service elements

Building your team’s upgrade skills

A great tool to help your team start learning about SAP S/4HANA upgrades is the enablement content available in SAP Enterprise Support services. The SAP Enterprise Support Academy program is our comprehensive learning management system, with more than 1,400 learning assets and services across all deployment scenarios and solutions. SAP Enterprise Support value maps are designed to help you use the content in SAP Enterprise Support Academy efficiently and make the most of the SAP Enterprise Support offerings.

Value maps are specialized learning spaces that focus on delivering SAP Enterprise Support services specifically tailored to your project requirements. They are designed to provide a targeted and personalized learning experience, catering to the unique challenges and goals of your organization. They help users navigate the vast amount of content and the multiple resources available, ensuring that they obtain all the information relevant to the success of your project.

The Cloud ERP Private Value Map helps you make the most of the SAP Enterprise Support offerings by surfacing the most relevant academy resources for your upgrade. It provides a focused learning path—highlighting self-paced courses, expert-led sessions, and hands-on workshops to support planning, preparation, and execution of your upgrade to the latest release.

The upgrade track on the value map provides learning resources to:

• Get started: Foundational Upgrade Learning—a collection of meet-the-expert recordings, e-learnings, and expert-guided implementation (EGI) workshops—provides essential knowledge to begin planning an upgrade and understand what to expect.

• Plan the upgrade project: Resources that help you define your upgrade strategy, assess readiness, and prepare required tasks.

• Understand innovations across business areas: Learn about the functional innovations you can adopt after upgrading.

• Deep dive into technical upgrade topics: Resources to ensure technical readiness and minimize risk.

• Use SAP’s continuous quality check (CQC) services: Customers can request CQC services at different stages of the upgrade to analyze the system and situation, identify potential issues early, and ensure a smooth, low-risk upgrade process.

Here are the details on SAP Enterprise Support value maps.

Accessing Value Maps

To access Value Map Groups, you must log in to SAP Community with an S-user ID or a Universal ID.

Select the Cloud ERP Private Value Map group, then click  “Join Group.”   Once inside, you can request a call with one of our topic experts to connect with the right enablement resources or simply click on “Guidance to Upgrade Efficiently”.

Some enablement content requires access to the SAP Enterprise Support Academy, where you can also browse our full range of learning opportunities.

Note: To provision a Universal ID, please follow these steps:

1. Visit the SAP Universal ID website
2. Sign up for an account using your company email
3. Link your existing S-user ID to your new Universal ID

Leveraging services and support from SAP and its ecosystem

Services and support offerings from SAP can help you with your S upgrades, so you can smoothly transition to newer versions or enhanced functionalities.

SAP Enterprise Support provides the foundational support included with every cloud subscription, helping to ensure a comprehensive digital support experience. It includes AI-powered services, best-practice content, quality checks, and mission-critical support. And SAP Learning Journeys deliver self-paced learning content to help your team build the skills your business needs for success today and tomorrow.

Taking advantage of personalized support plans

The SAP Preferred Success plan is available as a subscription service to boost your cloud consumption and adoption in alignment with your business objectives. SAP Preferred Success runs concurrently with your private cloud contract, providing guidance for increasing productivity, reimagining processes, accelerating innovation, lowering total cost of ownership, and mitigating risks. A subscription to the SAP Preferred Success plan offers access to a range of services specifically designed to address your upgrade needs:

• Solution planning tohelp you identify business process improvement opportunities in your current SAP system using SAP Signavio Process Insights or SAP Signavio Process Insights, discovery edition
• Upgrade best practices to educate your team on the why and how of a successful upgrade to a higher release
• Continuous clean core guidance to help you reach and maintain a clean core by regularly measuring and improving data management and extensibility in your core components
• Continuous application operations guidance to providea seamless and fully automated analysis of your current situation and to help you improve user experience, application stability, and performance
• Adoption services to help youunderstand new solutions and innovations, including SAP Business AI, the SAP Datasphere solution, SAP BTP, and new UX and sustainability solutions

The SAP Enterprise Cloud Services offerings, both those included and those available at extra charge, help you run and manage your private cloud solutions from SAP, with a wide range of services for managing such elements as software releases, hypercare, and performance.

You can tailor your support experience by selecting from our fixed-price, outcome-based packages. The fixed package of enhanced operations services for managed upgrades and updates focuses on end-to-end upgrade and update management. This includes project planning and coordination, dependency analysis and compatibility checks, as well as basic consultant support. For further details, see the service description document in SAP Trust Center.

Harnessing project-based services

With project-based services, you can choose single offerings to improve the success of initiatives you’re running today. Each project-based service focuses on delivering a specific outcome over a short, defined period. The services include such programs as the SAP Value Assurance program, a project engagement that helps safeguard solution deployment and compress timelines with a standardized, preconfigured methodology to mitigate risks from the start of your project through go-live. It includes direct support from a technical quality manager, helping ensure that your project runs smoothly and that services are delivered on time.

You can choose the level of service coverage and engagement for your upgrade project. From planning your technical upgrade to designing and implementing innovations, our service packages offer a predefined implementation structure that can be tailored to meet your desired outcomes. Examples include:

• Plan and safeguard service package to establish a foundation for your solution, helping you develop your upgrade strategy, identify dependencies, and define a new target architecture
• Business-ready service package, with additional design support activities that focus on a close-to-standard deployment of your SAP software and an update of your solution strategy, including new innovations, road map completion, and a design for solid and future-resistant architecture
• Business optimization service package, complementing the first two packages with custom code management, key to aiming for a clean core, in which we provide transparency into custom code and modifications and help you evaluate the impact of potential changes in custom code

Directly engaging with SAP experts for full transformation

With multiyear, exclusive premium engagements like the SAP MaxAttention program and the SAP ActiveAttention program, a dedicated SAP team integrates into your company, provides continuous direction for your transformation, and applies a holistic cloud approach to your whole business. SAP experts help you take on complex projects that reach across functions, processes, lines of business, and solutions while navigating the evolution of multiple cloud and hybrid landscapes. These engagements complement partner services and give you the flexibility to determine when to bring in committed resources and additional expertise.

With the long-term relationship in SAP MaxAttention, you gain an exclusive, holistic, end-to-end experience, tailored to your individual needs, your specific solution landscape, and your business goals. Join the SAP MaxAttention Community to connect with peers and gain insights from premium content that helps you to bring out your best.

Using partner services for upgrade projects

Many SAP partners not only offer RISE with SAP implementation services, but also can help you establish a regular upgrade routine and execute upgrade projects.

To identify the right partner for your needs, the SAP Partner Finder tool is a great starting point. This tool is expressly designed to help you discover and connect with partners within the SAP ecosystem. In the partner profile section, you can view a partner’s competencies for RISE with SAP. The underlying Competency Framework simplifies the content and helps you quickly find the expertise you need – no matter your business challenges, company size, or location.

Upgrading step by step

In this section, we summarize the main tasks involved in planning and executing an upgrade to your system. For more detailed guidance, consult the technical Upgrade Guide for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, the blog post Upgrade following SAP Activate, and the whitepaper Upgrading SAP S/4HANA - How, Why, and Best Practices (a guide for project managers on how to prepare and execute their upgrade and plan for post-upgrade).

Let's begin by highlighting a critical factor for a successful upgrade: the collaboration with the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services team. This partnership can help ensure a smooth technical upgrade, preparing you for the introduction of new features in SAP Cloud ERP Private. It’s essential to involve this team as early as possible to clarify the activities they must perform. The project plan should include when to request the execution of those tasks to mitigate potential impact on the project timeline. Reach out to your SAP contact for further support.

Among the tasks that SAP carries out are the operating system upgrade, the database upgrade, and the technical execution of upgrades. An upgrade service request must be created for the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services team, providing the required information, such as the target system release and the generated maintenance planner ID.

The SAP Enterprise Cloud Services team reviews the technical requirements for the Software Update Manager tool, initiates the upgrade according to the plan, and provides regular updates through the service request on the progress of the upgrade. After completing the upgrade activity, the team undertakes some post-processing tasks and quality checks, and hands the system back to the customer to continue with the project´s specific post-upgrade activities. For further insights into the roles and responsibilities of SAP Enterprise Cloud Services teams, see the Role of the technical team in a SAP Cloud ERP Private project.

In the next sections, we summarize the upgrade work by the phases in the SAP Activate innovation adoption process.

This graph outlines some of the key tasks to be completed in each phase:

Let’s closely analyze each phase.

Discover

The Discoverphase opens SAP Activate. The most important tool to execute when planning an upgrade project is the SAP Readiness Check for upgrades. From a business perspective, SAP Signavio Process Insights, discovery edition, can also be very helpful here, for providing tailored insightsinto current operational business processes based on the SAP S/4HANA source system data. For each line of business, this tool includes a list of recommendations for corrections to be carried out before the project starts and a list of recommendations for innovations to be considered along with the upgrade, such as intelligent technologies, SAP Fiori apps, and other SAP cloud solutions. The outcome of this phase includes the project scope, a high-level plan, and the business case to justify the investment.

Prepare

In the Preparephase, you need to understand and address the overall upgrade requirements and strategy. As a starting point, you should determine the maximum allowable downtime for business operations to help you choose a downtime optimization approach and define related requirements and tasks to be included in the upgrade project.

Furthermore, you should establish an upgrade strategy plan to determine upgrade cycles, possible dual maintenance needs to support the production system during the project, and any required temporary systems, such as a sandbox. Requesting the creation of a sandbox or additional temporary systems in this phase is crucial to making sure the systems are available when needed.

As part of upgrade preparation, you need to validate that the required infrastructure components, such as the SAP HANA database and operating system, fulfill the minimum technical requirements for the target SAP Cloud ERP Private version. If updates are necessary to those components, you must plan and request the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services team to execute them accordingly.

We strongly recommend using the Release Upgrade Management application in SAP for Me for managing the Enterprise Cloud Services requests as well as planning and coordinating the technical upgrade or update tasks related to the project. For detailed usage instructions, see SAP Note 3372118.

It is also a good practice to set up a project plan in SAP Cloud ALM that includes the SAP Readiness Check analysis. It will help you track the progress of required activities, such as refining relevant simplification items. The outcome of the Prepare phase includes the completion of the technical upgrade activities, the upgrade strategy, and a detailed upgrade plan.

Explore

You should start the Explore phase by running the Maintenance Planner. You have the option to either run the Maintenance Planner yourself or ask SAP Enterprise Cloud Services through a service request to run it for you. If SAP Enterprise Cloud Services runs it for you, you will receive the planning results for approval before proceeding with the next steps. The Maintenance Planner tool checks your components, add-ons, and activated business functions to ensure compatibility with the SAP Cloud ERP Private release to which you are upgrading and creates the stack file used during the upgrade process (for the Software Update Manager tool).

Another important Explore activity is running and reviewing the Simplification Item Check in detail. You need to resolve any results with red warnings before the upgrade, while yellow warnings are best resolved before but could also be resolved after the upgrade. SAP Notes help explain each simplification item.

While SAP Readiness Check showed the custom code impact from a higher level, now is the time to perform a more detailed custom code analysis with the ABAP test cockpit tool. The results can be visualized in the SAP Fiori Custom Code Migration app to help you distribute the required code mitigation activities. When planning to add innovation scenarios directly with or immediately after the upgrade, it is also good practice to review your current sizing and evaluate whether the current capacity is adequate. The most critical activity in this phase is to upgrade a copy of the production system such as your sandbox. With the completion of the sandbox upgrade, you should document the first version of the upgrade runbook.

Initial testing is also an essential part of Explore. It helps to confirm that the processes you expected to remain unimpacted are indeed running as before and to test new features, such as new SAP Fiori apps. This work fosters a better understanding of the latest functionalities to prepare you for creating the scripts to be executed in the following phases. The outcome of Explore is upgrading and testing a copy of the production system.

Realize

The Realize phase begins withthe upgrade of your development system. It includes additional post-upgrade activities such as activating the new SAP Fiori apps as well as integration, and custom code remediation. You need to implement new in-scope features, such as those that replace functionalities in the compatibility scope and execute the unit test in the development system.

Then, you need to upgrade the quality assurance system. Ideally, the quality system should be refreshed from a recent copy of the production system. During this phase, the integration, regression, user acceptance, and other previously planned tests are carried out. We recommend using SAP Cloud ALM as a central platform for test management along with a test automation tool of your choice.

Finally, the end-user training must get underway before the end of this phase. The outcome of the Realize phase is the upgrade of the non-production systems and preparation of the cutover plan.

Deploy

In this phase, you may want to mitigate risks by holding a dress rehearsal that follows the steps in your cutover plan. This helps ensure that the final upgrade can be executed as expected within the allowed business downtime.

Then, it is finally time to upgrade the production system (run the cutover), complete the post-upgrade activities, and set the system to live. After a hyper-care period, support is handed over, and the upgrade project can be closed. The outcome of Deploy is the upgrade and release of the production system.

Run

In the final phase, you must continue to monitor the system to ensure proper functioning. This is the time to plan and implement improvements and innovations to increase the efficiency of your processes. The outcome of Run is the ongoing system operations and implementation of the improvements and innovations previously defined.

Many SAP customers have built successful upgrade routines that others can learn from. This section includes tips and tricks from one such customer, as well as insights from an SAP expert on the best practices of several SAP customers he’s worked with.

Keeping it real through customer examples and best practices

Many SAP customers have built successful upgrade routines that others can learn from. This section includes tips and tricks from one such customer, as well as insights from an SAP expert on the best practices of several SAP customers he’s worked with.

Learning from Q_Perior / Wavestone

Q_PERIOR / Wavestone is a consulting firm specializing in business and technology solutions. They’ve completed three system upgrades since transitioning to SAP’s private cloud, with yearly upgrades in September, just before their year-end process begins. Over time, this regular approach has already helped bring down the average upgrade duration to between six and eight weeks. Q_PERIOR aims to minimize the impact on their business by shortening the upgrade duration even further. Staying on the latest release has proven beneficial for onboarding new acquisitions or country rollouts.

To ensure smooth upgrades, Q_PERIOR / Wavestone follows these best practices:

• Establishing a comprehensive project plan that they reuse for each upgrade
• Involving key stakeholders, such as business representatives and developers, early on in a kick-off meeting during the planning phase
• Incorporating lessons learned from previous upgrades into their planning process
• Carefully planning resource allocation in advance and naming individuals to be responsible for each task
• Completing a wealth of preparatory activities such as simplification checks and custom code checks through the SAP Readiness Check

Taking advice from SAP expert Leslie Castle

Leslie Castle is a UX specialist in the Regional Implementation Group who has worked with SAP customers for many years. In his blog post SAP Fiori - Customer Experiences in Optimizing Upgrades – Yes You Can Upgrade Regularly, he summarizes the following recommendations from several customers he knows who have successfully implemented regular upgrades:

• Upgrade regularly
  Regular upgrades have proven to be more efficient and less complex than upgrading due to maintenance needs. By upgrading every year, teams gain experience and establish efficient processes, so that upgrades approach a non-event.
• Set up an efficient and robust process
  A thorough process is crucial for smooth upgrades. One customer reported that their upgrade production downtimes were typically 24 hours, including 2.5 hours of verification. Regular upgrades help teams become more practiced at successful upgrading.
• Minimize the upgrade delta
  Performing regular upgrades keeps the number of changes in any one upgrade far more manageable, making the process easier to handle. The longer the gap after the last upgrade, the more complex the new upgrade project becomes.
• Make upgrading a business-as-usual activity
  With properly managed regular upgrades, the process comes to be a business-as-usual activity. This mindset prepares the organization to work around any downtime more willingly and ensures a smoother transition.
• Time upgrades intelligently
  When planning annual upgrades, consider avoiding blackout periods and peak periods such as Q4, especially if you have an online sales presence. This minimizes disruptions to business operations, improving both employee experience and your bottom line.
• Separate technical and functional upgrades
  To accelerate innovation, check whether your circumstances suggest separating technical and functional upgrades. If so, complete the technical upgrade first and then focus on adopting functional innovations as mini-projects in subsequent steps.
• Automate testing
  Consider using an automated test tool to streamline the post-upgrade testing of your SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fiori landscape. Although there is an upfront investment for setting up and configuring the tool, automation significantly streamlines the testing process. A wide array of automated test tools are available for SAP Cloud ALM.

Summary and links

Summary

These are the key benefits you can take advantage of in your upgrade journey:

Unleashing innovation:

• Unlock smoother, faster workdays with AI innovations and automation.
• Boost productivity and streamline processes with the latest features and business scenarios.
• Improve efficiency with optimized UX and collaboration capabilities.

Fostering security and compliance:

• Stay secure with built-in cybersecurity and data protection based on the latest standards
• Improve risk and compliance transparency and help ensure adherence to local and global regulations
• Respond to the latest compliance trends from various lines of business
• Prevent IT audit issues and stay compliant with usage of compatibility packs

Build your upgrade routine:

• Optimize your upgrade strategy and harness greater flexibility and easier-to-consume innovation with SAP’s new release and maintenance strategy.
• Reduce upgrade impact by following clean core principles and making upgrades a seamless part of your software lifecycle by running on the latest release and regularly adopting innovations.
• Leverage SAP Activate for SAP Cloud ERP Private for upgrades to guide you with timely deliverables, tasks, tools, and services that support the upgrade process.
• Streamline your upgrade with the Release Upgrade Management application.
• Assess upgrade impact with SAP Readiness Check.
• Reduce effort and improve quality with test automation.
• Benefit from SAP expertise and support for technical upgrades execution included in your private cloud subscription for smoother and more efficient upgrade operations.
• Upskill your team with the Enterprise Support Academy and dedicated Cloud ERP Private Value Maps.
• Streamline the process by leveraging services and support from SAP and its ecosystem.

Additional resources

• Access the release navigator tool (all upgrade resources in one place)
• What's new viewer
• Innovations for SAP Cloud ERP Private
• SAP Community for SAP Cloud ERP Private Upgrades
• Clean Core Strategy
• Upgrade Guide for SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition (technical)

And you can always talk to your SAP representative or visit us online.