SAP S/4HANA Maintenance — Goldilocks Bakeshop, Inc.
My first international engagement — maintaining and extending S/4HANA for a Philippine retail chain, developing new FICO functionality, Web GUI reports for Fiori, and Adobe Forms.
What I delivered
- Participated in SAP S/4HANA maintenance for international customers in the Philippines, developing new FICO functionality by simulating SAP standard logic with BAPIs and BDC.
- Authored technical specification (TS) documents for created and modified functionality.
- Developed Web GUI reports for Fiori interfaces and Adobe Forms to customer requirements.
Context
Goldilocks is a well-known bakeshop and restaurant chain in the Philippines. This was an application maintenance and support engagement rather than a greenfield implementation — a running production system, real users, and change requests arriving continuously.
It was also my first project with a client outside Vietnam, working across languages and time zones in English.
How maintenance differs from implementation
An implementation has a go-live date and a blank slate. Maintenance has neither. Everything you build lands in a system that is already live, already integrated, and already trusted by people who will notice immediately if it behaves differently.
Practically, that changed three things about how I worked:
- Understand before you change. Most of the effort went into reading the existing custom code and the configuration around it. The change itself was often small.
- Regression is the risk. The question is never only "does my change work" but "what else touches this".
- Documentation is a deliverable, not an afterthought. Which is why the TS documents mattered here more than on any implementation I had done.
My scope
New FICO functionality. Extending finance and controlling with logic the standard system did not cover, implemented by driving standard behaviour through BAPIs where one existed, and BDC where none did.
Web GUI reports for Fiori. Surfacing classic reports through the Fiori launchpad, so users got one entry point rather than switching between SAP GUI and Fiori.
Adobe Forms. Customer-specific print output built to their layout requirements.
Technical specifications. Every object created or modified, documented — purpose, logic, objects touched, test cases. On an AMS engagement, the person maintaining your code next year may not be you.
What working internationally taught me
Write it down, and write it plainly. When you cannot walk to someone's desk and there is a time-zone gap between question and answer, an ambiguous sentence costs a full day. My written English got noticeably more precise on this project, and my specs got better as a result.
To expand: the FICO functions in detail, and the Adobe Form templates.
Want the detail behind this?
Happy to walk through the technical decisions in a conversation.