What are the capabilities of SAP Process Integration

Integration for the demanding

The greater is the number of systems used in the company and the more complicated is the connection network between them, the more important is the role of the central administration and management of the entire IT landscape.

SAP Process Integration (SAP PI, formerly SAP XI – SAP Exchange Infrastructure), a solution from the SAP NetWeaver family, is a universal, stable and efficient platform that facilitates smooth development and implementation, changes maintenance in IT infrastructure and IT systems integration, regardless of whether the work organization in the company is based on SAP systems or any other systems.

Due to the needs that it meets, SAP PI can be used in any company, from medium-sized enterprises to large international corporations. However, SAP PI brings special benefits to companies with a very complex IT landscape, in which non-SAP applications play a large role, and messages flowing between applications being integrated are critical to the business continuity of a specific company.

The main criterion that needs to be addressed in the decision about the implementation of this type of platform is primarily the elimination of obstacles on the way to integration and cooperation of individual IT solutions in use. You should also consider the reliability of the infrastructure and the possibility of reducing the costs relating to the operation of these systems.

SAP PI offers a full range of possibilities related to systems integration. For existing interfaces, it enables advanced communication monitoring, both purely technical and business one, taking such factors as transmitted data volume, frequency of use for individual tasks and system load distribution over time into account.

Such an analysis may provide a basis for setting and configuring priorities of individual tasks or changing their scheduling, as well as a basis for identifying and solving current problems.

However, not only does the integration mean managing existing components and interfaces, but also development of new interfaces and communication methods. This is also an area where SAP PI helps users through mechanisms of developers locks for elements, changes management and component versioning.

Nobody needs to be convinced that the IT tools integration brings many benefits. First of all, it allows individual company departments and systems to share data. In this way, uniform, verified and reliable information can be used across the whole company. This facilitates cooperation and communication between departments and employees.

SAP PI enables both the exchange of master data – for instance information about business partners, materials, products and employees – as well as transactional data – including orders, deliveries, invoices and payments. It allows you to put company’s IT systems landscape in order, eliminate unnecessary workload and automate many operations and processes. In this way, it streamlines business processes in the company while maintaining full flexibility and adaptability to already existing and proven solutions.

Flexible development

Using middleware platform between two systems enables communication between them even if they couldn’t be connected together directly because of the lack of a common communication technology. This makes individual solutions independent of one another – an update carried out on one of them, or a substitution to a different one of a similar functionality can be completely imperceptible in the other solutions.

Furthermore, it is much easier to add a new solution to an existing landscape. The entire network of connections between applications becomes very flexible in adapting to any target system, often without the need to modify it in any way.

SAP PI can both replace an existing middleware system, and interoperate with it while being fully scalable. It uses proven standards, such as IDOC (Intermediate Document), XML (eXtensible Markup Language), WSDL (Web Service Description Language) or RFC (Remote Function Call), which are used by companies around the world and constitute a set of best practices for use in the business.

Combined advantages of ABAP and Java

SAP PI is based on two interoperating application servers: ABAP and Java. This enables the advantages of each of them to be intensively used, depending on the needs of a particular company, existing technologies and employees’ competences. Each message passing through SAP PI reaches it through one of the adapters: IDOC, file adapter, RFC or SOAP – in the case of remote calls of programs and procedures and an access to objects, JMS – for Java-based applications, JDBC – for data exchange directly with a database.

Depending on the format of data received, the technical and business contents of a message and many other defined factors, it can be assigned to various processes, processed in a specific way and delivered to the right place.

The main part of the processing itself is the message mapping from an input format to an output format using graphical mapping, an ABAP or Java mapping class, or XSLT transformation. The processing can result in both message creation, for example in the IDoc, XML or flat file format, as well as calling a Web service or an RFC remote procedure. More complex processes, involving a large number of systems or various messages, can be modeled using BPM (Business Process Modeling).

SAP with SAP…

The simplest example of integration is a connection of two SAP ERP systems, for example a system of the company itself and a system of its supplier (internal or external). Seemingly, a standard EDI communication is sufficient here – sending an IDoc message directly from one system to another via a combined RFC connection. The use of the SAP PI platform in this case is, however, an important element of the central management and monitoring of communication. It allows you to filter the data being transmitted, adjust a message format (for example, to an older release of the system on one of the sides involved in the exchange) or download additional data from another source during message processing.

Sending purchase orders generated by employees to the suppliers system, where a sales order is created, can be a good example of a process supported by SAP PI. Based on the order created, an outbound delivery is created by a user. It can be additionally sent, for example, with a breakdown into batches and pallets, then summed up in PI for individual materials based on EAN (in order to adapt to the message recipient’s requirements) and posted in the base system.

No matter how detailed the messages and custom solutions in partner systems are, an appropriate data transformation is never a problem thanks to the flexibility of SAP PI.

…and SAP with other solutions

A similar scenario applies to the exchange of EDI documents between the company’s SAP system and business partners’ solutions, not provided by SAP. In this case, data can be transmitted by any of the adapters delivered with the Process Integration platform, depending on the technical requirements of a partner system.

However, regardless of the technology used, such a combination ensures the security of data exchanged in each case and enables data flow to be monitored. It is also worth mentioning that additional custom adapters delivered by external entities can be installed easily. An example can be Seeburger – an adapter that enables the exchange of documents (purchase orders, orders, shipping notifications) based on the widely used EDIFACT standard, which allows data exchange between partners from various countries and industries, using I-EDI, an interactive data exchange protocol.

SAP PI for WMS solutions

Many manufacturing companies, retailers and logistics operators use technologies, such as barcode readers, RFID or mobile terminals for managing warehouses using an IT system. In this case, instant data exchange with the central SAP ERP system plays a key role. For ongoing processing of orders, it is essential that information about inventory balances is always reliable and up-to-date.

An example of a concrete solution can be the data exchange based on Web services on the side of the WMS system and IDoc for the SAP system.

Exchanged messages can be monitored at many levels, from a technical level (adapters monitoring), through mapping (for example, transformation of a stock transfer message), up to consistency checks and reconciliation of inventory balances in both interoperating systems.

Real-time customer service

In the case of orders that are placed via a call center and require quick feedback about the goods availability or a service at a specific time from a supplier’s system or a subcontractor’s system, it is recommended to use synchronous data exchange through Web services.

During a single phone conversation with a customer, it is possible to create a document with a query in the SAP system (for example, a service order) and to send it immediately through SAP PI to the customer’s system. The suitable configuration of queue prioritization enables a message to instantly reach a receiving system and a response to be obtained even if a volume of transmitted data is high, e.g. in the middle of a working day.

A dozen or so seconds from placing an order by phone to reflecting it in an IT system – that is the true customer service in real time using the capabilities of SAP PI!

Applications for interfaces

Information needs of some companies require creating additional applications supporting daily interfaces operation. For such uses, SAP Process Integration provides a number of web technologies, such as Business Server Pages (BSP), Web Dynpro (for both ABAP and Java) and Java Server Pages (JSP). A sample BSP application, based on the ABAP language, can be one of the steps of the message flow in an interface, enabling messages to be monitored and validated.

A sample use of BSP is the creation of an application to be run in a web browser, which will display a list of files or messages waiting in the PI system for further processing, allow their contents to be previewed, a message format validation log to be checked and – if everything is in order – enable a message to be sent to further processing stages.

The aim of such a solution can be the validation of a message before it is imported to a target system. BSP can also be used to monitor business processes based on the submitted documents and feedback from recipients.

Flexibility, a wealth of possibilities, reliability, scalability and openness to modifications and extensions – these are just some of the advantages of the SAP Process Integration platform.

Cascade data model

In case of exchanging the same data between multiple systems, each of which has its own data format, there is a need to minimize the number of dependencies between individual formats and systems. The response to this need is the implementation of a canonical data model independent of individual applications on the SAP PI platform.

This model introduces an additional level of intermediation between various systems, a special data format to be used by individual systems for communication. Communication is then a two-stage process: first, each message is mapped to an additional format, and then from this format to appropriate target formats.

Such an approach enormously facilitates the expansion of the existing IT landscape. Irrespective of the number of systems that are already involved in the integration, it is sufficient to create just the transformation from the format of a new solution into the canonical data model – the remaining part of the integration process is already in operation!

Flexibility, a wealth of possibilities, reliability, scalability and openness to modifications and extensions – these are just some of the advantages and major strengths of the SAP Process Integration platform. These features enable it to be used in virtually every company where it is necessary to connect at least two systems with each other. Due to the increasing IT needs of companies and an increasing number of applications in the system landscapes, integrated solutions must be built, expanded and continuously modified.

The number of ways to utilize an integration platform is just equal to the number of business requirements to be met, and in each case SAP PI helps achieve success.