Taking The Sting Out Of Outdated Custom Code

It seems that many IT folks would rather have a tooth extracted than come to grips with their custom code.

This is understandable since they are often the custodians of an ERP system that’s been tweaked and adapted over the course of a decade or two. With no clear insight into the scale of the problem, dealing with custom code can seem daunting. Where to begin? Hence, they put off their ERP modernization projects. Meanwhile, the business suffers from its inability to increase agility, just as IT continues to be stuck with overly complex operations.

Adapting incompatible code doesn’t have to hurt

However, evaluating and adapting can be less intimidating than it might seem. Here’s an example: One SAP customer, preparing to upgrade to a next-generation ERP solution, discovered tens of thousands of custom objects and source code items within its ERP system. IT staff were apprehensive about how much work would be involved. And when a readiness-check tool identified more than 4,000 objects incompatible with the new solution, this seemed like an impossible task.

However, using the tool, the team found that they could overcome about half of those problems with a simple fix to the material number field length. About a quarter of the issues were fixed with database views in the new ERP application that mimic the existing ERP structure. The rest required some changes to the code to account for new data models and performance improvements.