Introduction:
Just imagine if you could transform your applications from products to any other platform quickly and seamlessly. That would be awesome. Right?
For every Business, it is very crucial to work efficiently and make use of the insights effectively to stay ahead in the competitive environment. To achieve this much-needed synergy “Integration” is very much essential for seamless execution in the work environment across the systems and applications.
If integration is not in place, then there would be plenty of standalone applications running independently at the customer end which would be different. Some could be customized, and some may not even be on the cloud. This can lead to a lot of hassles and can affect the growth and productivity of your business negatively.
The Future of Business Technology is Cloud!
SAP provides powerful analytics and capabilities so that the customers can engage more in the cloud and accelerate their business needs. It has proven to solve many of the integration challenges and effectively takes care of the cloud application and hosting. With plenty of powerful features and reliability at its end, it has proven to be a boon in solving many integration requirements.
Integration with S/4HANA:
SAP cloud platform integration – SAP CPI helps simplify the custom-driven integration with the S/4HANA cloud by making use of the variety of SAP S/4HANA Cloud APIs. These APIs play an instrumental role during the data exchange with other systems. CPI is a perfect platform to get into the integration of S/4HANA with other SAP and non SAP systems or any other kind of third-party application. In the IT landscape, it is a highly critical ERP system and needs to be integrated with other applications to exchange the important transactional data, master data, and a lot more. Offering OData and SOAP protocol-based APIs, it is perfectly equipped to meet any kind of requirement in the present as well as in the future. The application can be in the form of Supply chain management or any database system, ECC system, APO, or cloud application.
CPI is highly effective and capable of transferring data with these technologies.
- It helps receive the IDoc from S/4HANA and then converts them to XML before transferring to the target system.
- It can receive synchronous web service calls from S/4HANA and transfer them to the target application. This allows back and forth communication and sends back to S/4.
- It can call Remote Functional Call (RFC) enabled Function Module, can perform the query or Update operation, and then the response gets captured and is sent to the targeted application.
- CPI can easily send and receive data from/to OData services published in S/4HANA.
Capabilities of CPI:
SAP allows organizations of all sizes to connect with any combination of cloud and on-premise applications. There are numerous features offered by the CPI integration and these includes
Pre-packaged contents and support
SAP offers built-in integration that helps reduce the development time and is highly scalable. Presently, it offers 314 contents that are related to A2A, B2B, B2G integrations.
These examples are-
- S/4 HANA- C4C integration
- S/4 HANA- Success factor integration
- S/4 HANA- Commerce Cloud Integration
- S/4 HANA- Country Specific Govt. Integration and a lot more.
It helps automate the business processes providing real-time visibility over each application making execution easier enabling informed business decisions. S/4 HANA comes with pre-configured integration content that just needs a few configuration steps to make your processes productive. It helps reduce the time, money, and effort during the integration.
CPI Connectors
There are several connectors CPI has to offer and it allows these connectors to connect with most of the systems. These connectors allow the integration with SOAP, SFTP, IDoc, RFC, OData, HTTP, Mail connector, etc. These allow it to connect to third-party applications during customization and development. These connectors support easier connectivity with a large number of third-party applications by providing standard connectors.
Other Built-In Tools
CPI offers numerous tools to solve the challenges that may often come up during the integration. The built-in tools it offers helps transform business messages from one form to the other a lot easier. It helps in the transformation most effectively and conveniently.
Example- IDoc file can be easily converted to a simple file format. In addition to this, these built-in tools offer support to the scripting languages like JavaScript, Groovy, and XSLT. This helps in resolving many complex transformational requirements. It offers security-related encryption, decryption, signing, and verification in the most effective manner. It helps deal with XML, JSON formats and has converters to generate XML- CSV, JSON- XML, JSON-CSV messages.
B2B Integration
CPI offers features to deal with Edifact, AnsiX12, Tradacom, Odetter messages. It seamlessly supports B2B integration with S/4HANA as it can easily convert EDI messages to XML and EDI to IDoc, integration with 3rd Party applications. The high-end security features it offers generate advanced security connectivity options which include AS2, AS4, SFTP to securely connect with the 3rd application.
Message monitoring tools
The effective monitoring tools allow the teams to perform the actions required conveniently ensuring the data reaches the target systems. It provides the list of messages passing to and from S4/HANA and other applications. Whenever there is any failure, a list of log messages is made available to help fix any bug issue that may affect productivity.
CPI is running on SAP’s cloud platform (SCP) and it is a platform-as-a-service offering. Most of the connectivity options are configured here and allow authorization & access as and when required.
Conclusion:
Most SAP customers are inclined towards leveraging the benefits of Cloud based systems. With competitive business requirements, it is imperative to deploy hybrid, scalable solutions to meet the existing requirements and help improve business ROI. To solve the integration issues in the Enterprise landscape SAP brought CPI into existence while taking into consideration the security, speed, and reliability aspects of the platform. The platform is safe, secure, and reliable and is best suited for S/4 HANA Integration. With this, you can dedicate more time to meet the needs of your customers in the best possible manner. Just remember not to consider the functional benefits but also the capabilities it offers to help grow your business.
The changing needs in the Business environment has resulted in innovation and development of technological solutions. That’s why the business department and processes need to be upgraded regularly. If you are looking for an integration support with comprehensive services then SCPLAN Consulting is your right Strategic Partner! With robust business integration services across the value, it offers seamless processes to manage your diverse business tasks to optimally cover all the needs. SCPLAN Consulting has the right experience, extensive consulting and business expertise across the industries to handle all kinds of integration requirements from start to finish. With holistic services in supply chain planning with SAP Solution, it offers added value expertise as your Strategic and reliable partner based on your customized requirements.
