Trupti Raikar

Preserving Clean core Principles and Architecture for Intelligent ERP

Abstract:

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging trend in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as companies strive to use this technology to improve their business intelligence, automate decision-making, and optimize business operations. Nevertheless, implementing AI capabilities directly into ERP may result in too much customization, which is against the principle of Clean Core in the current SAP system designs. Clean Core strategy focuses on keeping the SAP ERP core in a constant and standard form and allows innovation through external extension. In this work, the demand forecasting model based on machine learning is proposed and developed to adopt AI and SAP systems without breaching the Clean Core architecture. The research uses the Walmart Store Sales data, which comprises past sales data and economic variables, including temperature, fuel price, consumer price index (CPI), unemployment rate, and holiday events. Various types of regression-based models are used to predict the demand of weekly sales such as Linear Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost. The experimental findings show that the XGBoost model has the best predictive accuracy by having a higher score of 0.94 of R. The trained model is deployed as a cloud-hosted AI service on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) with SAP AI Core, which allows a smooth integration into the enterprise workflows over API. Also, a recommendation layer, which is based on SAP Joule, generates actionable insights, depending on the estimated demand. The proposed architecture demonstrates how AI-driven forecasting models can support enterprise decision-making without compromising the stability, scalability, and upgradeability of ERP systems.

Brief Profile:

Trupti Raikar is an SAP Technology Architect expert in AI/ML, ERP modernization, and cloud transformation. Based in Cedar park, TX, she focuses on AI ML, SAP BTP, SAP S/4HANA, and performance engineering, supply chain management and EHS domains. A PMP-certified professional, Trupti is also active as a researcher, mentor, industry judge, and speaker.