What's new with SAP? A winter 2026 review
It's been a busy and technically exciting autumn at TMO Consulting. Among other things, we're building customer-specific Digital Manufacturing solutions using SAP DM, BTP and ECC, along with the cloud services BTP offers. In a separate project, we're developing a UI5-based MES solution on top of SAP ECC.
SAP's vision and reality
In its own announcements, SAP often showcases new user interface features, especially for Fiori apps. For most customers, however, core functions such as order processing and inventory management are already highly automated, and manual work only adds cost. Manually editing a small sales order line worth less than a hundred euros, for example, takes time and labour that can easily eat up the order's entire margin.
In practice, then, the real value comes not from the latest updates but from designing processes that require as few manual steps as possible and where systems communicate seamlessly with each other.
A multi-system future
SAP functionality is increasingly spread across different platforms and systems, and functions are more often accessed through APIs, for example. This shift brings a significant need for new skills. Where mastering one large system and knowing ABAP might once have been enough, today's work calls for a broader skill set: managing integrations, using cloud platform services, applying modern web technologies, and combining data from multiple sources.
ABAP development and ERP/ECC remain strong and still hold more data than any other system, but future solutions will increasingly be built in multi-system environments. We believe companies should follow the path SAP has laid out and make use of new platforms and services whenever a solution spans several systems. This keeps solutions scalable and gives them a long lifecycle.
What does an S/4HANA upgrade really bring?
Some of our customers have already upgraded to S/4HANA using the so-called brownfield approach, where existing functionality is retained and the underlying technology is updated. In our experience, these projects usually involve a relatively small workload, and the fine-tuning that comes up during testing can be handled without full-time project allocations.
Many organisations expected S/4HANA upgrades to bring major functional changes. In reality, most of the technical capabilities were already available in the ECC era, and we've been building on them for years. These solutions continue to work as they are after the upgrade, and in most cases users barely notice any functional changes.
What's next for TMO
We started UI5 development back in 2016, expecting the move to Fiori to happen quickly. Our first project was a mobile warehouse management (WM) solution, and we've delivered many more since. Even so, SAP GUI has held its ground as users' primary tool, and Fiori apps have so far found their place mainly in mobile use.
As we expanded our web development, we discovered that modern web technologies can be brought into the SAP GUI environment as well. We've built several transactions where, for example, project content is displayed using React libraries, and user clicks open either web-based views or traditional SAP screens. This means even legacy transactions can be launched from modern, visually fresh screens without having to rebuild them as REST services.
Just as we've built an extensive in-house library for logistics, PLM processes and document management on the ABAP side over the years, we're now creating a similar toolkit for the BTP environment. We've long emphasised to our customers that ECC is also a modern tool on which externally callable services can be built efficiently.
SAP environments are evolving relentlessly. Success therefore comes from combining strong ABAP and ECC expertise with the use of new platforms.
