#96 TPM, Retiring Code, Dev Survey, AI Warp Speed
In this issue:
Speed and Stasis
My incredibly profound influence on the world of SAP bore fruit: I complained about the lack of analysis of Developer Insights Survey 2025 and lo, they appeared! The survey results paint a picture of an ecosystem at multiple crossroads. I’ve got a story in this issue that goes into detail on one of those crossroads I see.
(Note: I do not actually believe that I have this sort of influence on SAP or…well…anything.)
One perspective on maintaining ERP systems is balancing speed and stability. The most stable system is one that changes as little as possible; the most useful system is one that changes as much and as quickly as necessary to accomplish business goals. So every change is a risk tradeoff: we could achieve a business goal, but in doing so we have some chance of destabilizing the system. Factor in the human effort to affect said change, and you have enough numbers to make a pretty rad spreadsheet that will surely impress risk analysts.
The latest approaches to clean core and the latest ways of leveraging AI agents to perform the changes means that the spreadsheet could look much different than it has in the past. If you can recover in (let’s say) minutes rather than months from a bad change, maybe it’s more OK to make more changes! The speed and stability equation has changed, and the SAP ecosystem needs to adjust to a new normal. PM
Hot Skill Alert: TPM
OK, hot SAP skill chasers, I have one for you: Trading Partner Management (TPM).
Everyone knows B2B integration is super important but also at least one of the “Bs” must stand for “boring”. Hence hardly anyone wants to deal with it. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) concept is meant to streamline such integrations but its SAP incarnation as IDocs scared away quite a few professionals (except for me, the renowned IDoc book author) and created a nice niche for the brave.
Enter TPM, the lesser-known part of SAP Integration Suite aka application that “helps you manage EDI business relationships with multiple trading partners”.
If you dare to get in on this, there is low key excellent blog series on the subject: here is Part 1, 2, 3, and 4. For the B2B-curious, there is also this overview on SAP Learning site and this YT video. You’ve heard it here first, folks. Buy us a cup of coffee from your huge salary increase, eh? JP
SAP Pace vs AI Pace
If you’re in the SAP ecosystem long enough, you get accustomed to a certain pace. It’s popular to complain about how things change and you need to learn new things as an ABAP developer or other kind of SAP nerd - but outside of the ERP bubble the rest of the tech world is accustomed to a much quicker pace. If you were to deep-freeze your ABAP brain in 2015 and thaw it out today, you could still find gainful employment doing the stuff you knew then. If you did the same thing in the web development world, you’d have a much harder time.
In the last few months, the pace of the AI world has seen a marked shift. This directly influences the entire software industry, as even SAP has undergone a small board shakeup, with Christian Klein aimed at doubling further down on AI. According to the story, SAP recognizes that Joule isn’t quite what it was cracked up to be (though the story doesn’t use the word “Joule”): “customers, resellers and investors have raised doubts about the prices and value of the company’s flagship AI product”.
You can see some evidence of the world’s AI pace reaching into SAP-land in the recent Developer Insights Survey results.
This little chart is from results gained in early 2025, where 20% of the respondents have already begun actively using gen AI. Achieving 20% adoption of anything new is an insane pace for SAP folks - and I absolutely guarantee that results which are being gathered now will show a huge uptick. Huge.
But this gen AI usage likely isn’t much coming from SAP’s own offerings. One snapshot (I know - there are other ways of slicing this):
There are lots of online musings and complaints (a few of them are my own) about Joule's capabilities, so I don't need to re-hash them here. All I need to point out is that SAP isn't meeting the moment with AI. SAP is doing Joule, an AI tool, at SAP pace. They need to be doing Joule at AI pace. PM
Retiring ABAP Code
Identifying and eliminating unused custom ABAP code is one of the main cost-saving measures in SAP upgrades and migrations. Some sources claim that up to 60% of custom code is identified as unused during ECC to S/4HANA migrations. Based on my personal experience, that sounds about right.
The prospect of a 60% cost reduction will certainly make any project manager’s eyes light up with dollar signs. But as this post explains, sending your custom ABAP code to “The Golden Bytes” retirement home might not be as simple in practice.
One of the main reasons is that ABAP code can be intertwined in the most convoluted and unexpected ways. It’s relatively simple to retire a plain report but it becomes more complicated with objects such as INCLUDEs, function modules, classes, and other miscellaneous bits.
As always, prevention is key. When introducing custom code, make a plan for its potential retirement. Creating a meaningful structure of packages or classes, and ensuring there is no funny business with dynamic calls and similar constructs, pays off bigly in the long run. JP
Claude Code + SAP Skills
Marius Kruger shared a very thoughtful post about combining the power of Claude Code with SAP expertise. It isn’t just a collection of prompts or “look ma, an ABAP report”. Marius outlines a “mental model”, valid use cases and challenges (“The documentation is accurate but extensive” - ain’t that the truth?).
Read it, think about it, follow Marius for the follow-up posts he promised. On a related note, with ChatGPT boycott gathering momentum, Claude might as well take over. Get on board. JP
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