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Why Finding Standard SAP Objects Is Difficult?

· 2 min read
Darshita Chaturvedi
Darshita Chaturvedi
Co-Founder & CEO, Adri AI

Consultants struggle to find standard SAP capabilities before developing custom code for several interconnected reasons:

1. Sheer Volume and Fragmentation​

SAP systems contain millions of objects (e.g. 27 million standard objects in S/4HANA alone). These are scattered across:

  • Transaction codes, function modules, BAPIs
  • Tables, views, and CDS views
  • Business objects and APIs
  • Configuration settings and enhancement points

There's no single, searchable index that shows "here's what SAP can do out of the box."

2. Poor Native Search and Documentation​

  • SE37/SE80 are limited: You need to know what you're looking for. If you don't know a function module exists, you can't search for it effectively
  • SAP Help Portal is generic: Documentation describes features conceptually but doesn't surface specific technical objects
  • No semantic search: Traditional keyword searches miss relevant objects if you don't use exact SAP terminology

3. Knowledge Gap Between Business Requirements and Technical Objects​

When a business user says "we need to auto-calculate freight costs," consultants must translate that to:

  • Is there a standard BAPI for this?
  • Does pricing configuration handle it?
  • Are there relevant BAdIs or user exits?
  • What tables store freight data?

This translation requires deep system knowledge that junior/mid-level consultants often lack.

4. Time Pressure and Misaligned Incentives​

  • Research is unbudgeted risk: No time is set aside purely for research. Even if a consultant diligently searches for standards for a day and finds nothing, they're a day behind on implementation with nothing to show for it
  • Visible effort bias: It's harder to prove the effort and complexity of your work when you propose a standard solution. Writing 10,000 lines of custom code is immediately recognizable; finding the right BAPI is not
  • Default to custom: Many consultants default to "build custom" because it's faster than proving a standard solution exists (or doesn't) and custom code is easier to justify on timesheets

5. Version Complexity​

ECC 6.0 vs S/4HANA have different capabilities. A consultant might not know:

  • CDS views in S/4HANA could replace their custom join logic
  • A new RAP business object exists for their use case
  • An old BAPI has been deprecated/replaced

Why SAP Research Agent Matters​

SAP Research Agent solves the discoverability problem. By indexing ~50M standard objects and making them semantically searchable, it essentially asks consultants: "Did you check if SAP already built this?" before they write code.

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Try out SAP Research Agent here: https://research.getadri.ai/