SAP RISE is reshaping the way enterprises approach transformation. It’s no longer about whether to move to the cloud, but how quickly, how cleanly, and how intelligently. Yet, amid new infrastructures, smarter analytics, and promises of rapid innovation, one critical factor often stalls progress: custom code.
Legacy customisations built over decades can’t simply be discarded. They hold key operational logic, compliance controls, and business-specific workflows. But dragging all that code into your new landscape without inspection? That’s an invitation to technical debt, upgrade friction, and system inefficiencies.
Addressing these challenges head-on ensures not only a smoother migration but also positions the enterprise for future scalability and innovation.
Let’s delve deeper into how custom code plays a pivotal role in SAP RISE transformations.
Simplfy your code migration with our powerful automated smart code migration to SAP RISE & S4HANA
What's inside RISE with SAP: A blueprint for digital transformation.
RISE with SAP offers more than just a migration path—it establishes a new foundation for how enterprises evolve their systems, scale operations, and stay ahead of change. It combines essential components like ERP modernization, process intelligence, infrastructure, and lifecycle tools into one structured transformation approach. But its true value lies in how it helps organizations move away from complex, heavily customized environments toward clean, future-ready architectures.
For IT teams, this transformation is about more than deploying systems to the cloud. It’s about reducing technical debt, simplifying upgrade paths, and preparing the landscape for faster adoption of new innovations. A clean core becomes essential, minimizing deeply embedded custom code and shifting business-specific logic into flexible, upgrade-safe layers.
RISE supports this journey through built-in readiness assessments, guided transformation services, and tooling that helps enterprises evaluate their existing custom code, identifying what to retain, what to refactor, and what to retire.
By aligning architecture with long-term business agility, RISE with SAP creates the conditions for faster decision-making, reduced costs, and sustainable modernization. For organizations managing code migration, this blueprint offers structure, clarity, and a direct route to becoming a truly adaptable enterprise.
What SAP Enterprises must know about custom code migration.
Embarking on a SAP RISE transformation journey necessitates a thorough understanding of custom code migration. Custom code, tailored to address specific business needs, can become a double-edged sword during migration. While it offers unique functionalities, it can also introduce complexities if not managed correctly.
Here are key considerations for enterprises:
1. Comprehensive Code Assessment
Before initiating migration, it’s imperative to conduct a detailed analysis of existing custom code. This assessment identifies redundant or obsolete code segments, ensuring that only essential customizations are carried forward.
2. Prioritization and Categorization
Not all custom code holds equal value. By categorizing code based on its business impact and technical relevance, enterprises can prioritize which segments require immediate attention and which can be deprecated.
3. Leveraging Automated Tools
Modern tools, such as the SAP Custom Code Migration App, facilitate automated code analysis and adaptation. These tools expedite the migration process, reduce manual errors, and ensure compliance with SAP’s best practices.
4. Continuous Monitoring and Optimization
Post-migration, it’s essential to monitor the performance of migrated custom code. Regular audits and optimizations ensure that the code remains efficient and aligns with evolving business requirements.
Achieve a Clean Core without Losing Business Logic
As enterprises shift to SAP S/4HANA under the RISE with SAP framework, one strategic focus becomes non-negotiable: achieving a clean core. But clean doesn’t mean empty. It means purposefully removing technical debt while preserving business-critical logic in a sustainable, upgrade-friendly structure.
Over the years, many SAP environments have accumulated layers of custom code—some still highly relevant, others long outdated. Much of it supports compliance, specialized processes, or integrations that standard systems simply don’t cover. But taking all of it into a new system “as-is” creates avoidable risk—slower transformation, higher TCO, and barriers to adopting future innovations.
The priority, then, is not to delete business logic, but to reposition it intelligently. This means extracting what still delivers business value, simplifying what’s overly complex, and externalizing what doesn’t belong in the core system.
Here’s what successful clean core alignment looks like:
1. Separate signal from noise: Conduct a full inventory of existing custom code. Identify logic that’s still used, strategically relevant, and tightly coupled to business outcomes, versus what’s outdated, redundant, or non-compliant with modern architecture.
2. Structure for stability: Rebuild retained logic in a modular way that doesn’t interfere with the core system’s upgrade path. This reduces regression risks and simplifies ongoing system maintenance.
3. Keep the core clean by design: Shift custom functionalities out of the core system and into clearly defined extension layers. This gives the enterprise flexibility to adopt new updates without reworking logic every time.
For organizations embarking on SAP RISE transformations, migrating custom code is often the heaviest lift and the most underestimated. Diligent’s Smart Code Migration (SCM) tool transforms this phase from a bottleneck into a strategic advantage by combining automation, precision, and full-cycle validation.
Here are the core capabilities that make it indispensable for SAP migration teams:
1. Intelligent Code Discovery and Analysis
- Automatically evaluates custom code from ABAP Test Cockpit runs
- Highlights critical issues and code debt by priority (P1, P2, P3)
- Delivers clear insights into remediation needs across modules
This front-loaded visibility gives IT teams a fast, reliable understanding of what they are working with and how it impacts migration.
2. Built-in Remediation with Smart Quick Fix
- Applies SAP-aligned fixes using rule-based automation
- Replaces inefficient patterns like SELECT SINGLE with optimized queries
- Adapts legacy table structures to support modern object models
Instead of rewriting manually, the tool standardizes and updates code based on proven remediation logic, saving months of work.
3. Consistent Testing and Compliance
- Runs post-fix unit tests to ensure reports and programs behave as expected
- Provides 100% test coverage with full traceability
- Automatically documents every change for audit readiness and team handovers
This guarantees not only clean code but trusted results, with compliance baked into every step.
4. Fast-Track Migration with Enterprise Precision
- Reduces project workload by 80% compared to manual conversion
- Accelerates go-lives by compressing delivery timelines through parallel processing
- Delivers consistent code quality across entire migration sets
This makes clean core alignment realistic, even in complex, highly customized SAP landscapes.
Your Next Move Toward Intelligent SAP RISE Migration
Code migration doesn’t have to be a roadblock. With the right tools and process, it becomes the bridge between legacy complexity and cloud-driven agility. As RISE with SAP continues to reshape enterprise ERP strategies, getting your custom code right is essential to maintaining system integrity, innovation speed, and cost control.
Diligent’s Smart Code Migration Tool is built to handle this with precision, reducing manual effort, enabling intelligent automation, and accelerating clean-core readiness. From deep analysis to remediation and validation, it supports SAP teams across the entire migration lifecycle with clarity, consistency, and confidence.
