Your ERP is where the business actually happens: every invoice, order, and payment. Yet for most organizations, that data sits outside the catalog, understood by a handful of long-tenured experts and documented or governed nowhere.

What’s new: SAP S/4HANA integration

SAP S/4HANA holds the core business data (finance, sales, procurement, and operations) for a large share of the world’s enterprises. The new SAP S/4HANA integration brings that system’s metadata into Collibra Platform, so SAP sits in your catalog alongside your warehouses, lakes, and BI tools instead of off to one side.

Collibra connects to your system through the SAP Java Connector (JCo) via the RFC layer and ingests tables, database views, and columns, including your custom Z-tables. Scope the ingestion by SAP application component (FI, MM, SD, and so on) and by table type: application, customer, or system tables, views, an explicit list, or a custom filter. You bring in exactly the slice you need, not the full ERP.

Profiling: Understand the shape and quality of your SAP data directly on the ingested tables.
Sampling: See actual sample data from SAP tables without leaving Collibra.
Classification: Classify SAP data so sensitive and business-critical fields are identified.
Technical lineage: Optionally trace field-level lineage within SAP, including source code.

With this in place, a steward can certify the authoritative source for revenue, and an analyst can find the right table without booking time with the one person who knows the ERP.

How the SAP S/4HANA integration helps

Ask a data team where the revenue number comes from and the trail usually goes cold at the ERP. SAP is famously structured and famously opaque: thousands of tables, naming conventions that reward long tenure, and knowledge that walks out the door when someone retires. The consequences are practical. Three teams rebuild the same logic three different ways. A steward can't confirm which table is authoritative. A privacy assessment stalls because half the estate isn't documented. And every AI initiative downstream inherits that ambiguity. Bringing SAP into the same catalog as everything else is how that ends.

Problems it solves

Knowledge that lives in people's heads. ERP structures get documented, owned, and searchable, so expertise survives turnover.
Manual, brittle upkeep. Spreadsheets and one-off extracts give way to scheduled updates that stay current as the ERP changes.
Custom integration overhead. A supported connection replaces the bespoke scripting that SAP metadata has historically demanded.
Trails that no longer go dark inside the ERP. With lineage enabled, you can follow SAP data field by field, including the source code behind it, instead of treating S/4HANA as a black box.

Inside the SAP S/4HANA integration

The integration connects Collibra to your SAP S/4HANA system through Collibra Edge, which sits inside your network boundary, so connection credentials stay under your control and only metadata travels to Collibra Platform.

Getting started takes three steps: create the connection on your Edge or Collibra Cloud site, add the synchronization capability to it, then synchronize, either on demand or on a schedule. It's the same pattern used across Collibra's other integrations, so anyone who has onboarded a source before will recognize it, and the schedule means the catalog keeps pace with the ERP without anyone remembering to press a button.

What arrives in Collibra is a familiar structure, built entirely from asset types that ship out of the box: the SAP system itself, its database, schemas, tables, database views, and columns. Nothing has to be modeled or configured first. Because these are standard Collibra assets, SAP data immediately joins the same domains, workflows, stewardship assignments, and search results as the rest of your catalog, which is the whole point. It isn't a parallel system for SAP; it's SAP in the system you already use.

An S/4HANA schema in Collibra, its tables and views built entirely from out-of-the-box asset types and carrying SAP's own table types and source descriptions.

System down to column, exactly as SAP organizes it and exactly as Collibra already models it, no custom configuration required.

You decide what comes in. Table filtering, set per domain, means you can start with the tables your governance program actually needs, finance first for example, and expand from there rather than ingesting the full ERP on day one. Lineage is optional and can be enabled for synchronized metadata when you want traceability from SAP structures within the S/4HANA application.

Why you should be excited

Data stewards and governance leads. Core ERP data finally comes under the same policies, ownership, and certification standards as every other source in your estate. You can assign stewardship to SAP tables without waiting on a custom project, and scope what gets ingested domain by domain so the catalog stays curated rather than bloated.
Data engineers and platform teams. The bespoke extraction scripts and the maintenance they quietly demand can be retired. Set the synchronization schedule once and ERP documentation keeps itself current, with credentials and connection details never leaving your own network.
Data analysts and BI developers. Finding the right SAP table becomes a search rather than a favor asked of the one person who knows. You can see what a column actually means before writing the query instead of after the numbers disagree, and when lineage is on, trace the data back within the ERP layer.

Use cases

Knowing what breaks before you change it. Ahead of a change in SAP, a team turns on lineage and reviews data depending on the affected tables. What used to be a mailing-list question with uncertain coverage becomes a diagram, and a change that used to carry surprise risk becomes a planned one.
One inventory for the regulator. A privacy team building a personal-data inventory needs coverage across both the cloud warehouse and SAP. Instead of maintaining a separate SAP spreadsheet that's outdated the week it's finished, they synchronize the relevant schemas, tag the columns holding personal data, and report from a single source.
Trusting the number in the board deck. A finance data team brings the S/4HANA finance tables into a dedicated domain, certifies the authoritative sources behind the close, and documents what each field means. When a reported figure gets questioned, the reviewer starts from a certified catalog entry rather than reverse-engineering a query, and the answer takes minutes instead of days.

Key takeaways

Governance only counts when it covers the systems where the business actually runs, and for most enterprises, that means SAP. The SAP S/4HANA integration closes that gap, bringing ERP metadata into Collibra Platform and the same three-step setup as every other Collibra source. Because it uses out-of-the-box asset types, SAP data immediately joins the workflows, stewardship, search, and lineage that govern everything else and can power your AI agents.

Where to learn more about the SAP S/4HANA integration

Ready to connect your ERP? The SAP S/4HANA integration documentation walks through setting up the connection on Edge, adding the synchronization capability, and scheduling your first sync