Multi-country hybris architecture

[Former Member]

HI there all hybris folks! I am currently running a new multy-country hybris project and there will be more than 20 different countries in it. I have a couple of questions based on information I know so far. The company is an international brand which operates in 4 different continents that it involves different languages, many currencies and a lot of differences between countries...

What is the best architectonical approach to set up a solid and scalable solution? Is it better to go for multi-tenant approach or separate hybris installation per continen/regiont? Is there any better idea like the one which is selling the Expert Services, which has the unique catalog, unique solr index and some howe manages all our inqueries?

It seems like not many recommendations so far here, so It would be great to start discussing it here!

Any help would be great!

[Marko_salonen · Accepted solution]

My tip is that don't use multi tenant and don't use multi site installation. Usually the product data are the same , in some rare cases customer has had requirements that some properties are not visible in some countries but this can be solved in classification somehow (i have tried to pass these requirements for now). The prices and availability are usually the things that differ. For this i recommend the multicountry package where you can specify different availabilities for products. Availability groups and userprice groups are configured into basestore. Then there is the case that the different locations might want to have different cms content and this is supported by multicountry package as well (i think this i standard since 6.6, otherwise i think SAP are happy to share it 🙂 . So i would recommend :

• One tenant

• One product catalog with each product having different price per country and availability group to correct basestore

• Each country a basestore with usergroups and availability group

• Each country a site with own cms catalog (local catalogs)

• A glocal catalog with the content that is shown for all sites.

Then handle differences in logic with strategies. For example: - Is there differences between stockhandling - Payments? Best to have one payment integration but some countries might have methods like invoices - Some countries might have special chat clients - try to solve with cms as much as possible.

generally try to keep it as much as same as possible 🙂 It is a hard role but i assume you seem to a lead somehow, so you need to recommend the best for the customer 🙂

[nicolabeghin · Accepted solution]

AFAIK multi country package is offered by Hybris professional services as a paid package/service, has this changed with 6.6?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi and thanks for answering so quickly! I have one question regarding your comments: what do you mean by "availability groups"? Price groups and its availability? It's a B2B project and there will be different price rows for different customers. Anyways, I think you wanted to say something else, so please if you could expand on that? It would be great!

Thanks, Vik

[Marko_salonen · Accepted solution]

Hi, the multi country package is since version 6.6 OOTB to my understanding. Availability group defines on which markets the products are visible. In the case that you have b2b use cases, then you might have even more granular user price groups that sets specific prices. But availability group can define on which markets the product is visible.

[nicolabeghin · Accepted solution]

hi that's great news! I found this https://help.hybris.com/6.7.0/hcd/9b6a43313c3e4587b664370cb94391a5.html but it refers to CMS-related multicountry management, it doesn't seem to me it contains the products-related part of the multicountry package. Is that supposed to be?

[Marko_salonen · Accepted solution]

sorry for late response 🙂 Seems that i did not get any notifications for this. I realize as well that it seems as this part is missing. I need to contact someone at SAP and ask about this. My understanding was that it should be there , all of it.

[geffchang · Accepted solution]

What is the best practice for Solr index? 1 index per store?
Is it OK to have 1 index for many stores?

[agrabovskis]

This video should help as a starting point (covers some management aspects as well): https://wiki.hybris.com/display/custwebinvideo/SAP+Hybris+Commerce+Multi-Implementations

This one is a bit older but might be of some help as well: https://wiki.hybris.com/display/custwebinvideo/Deploying+Multiple+Store+Fronts

[vinod_singh]

Experts, quick question :

Did anyone use below mentioned in https://help.sap.com/viewer/9d346683b0084da2938be8a285c0c27a/2005/en-US/cb34c49145d9478b861f7bbec236... in there project, if yes can you let me know if this is specific for only content catalogue and smartedit (CMS).

By default, the system provides the following configuration options:

• ALL_CATALOGS: uses all catalogs from the hierarchy. This is the default configuration.
• LEAF_CATALOGS: uses only the current catalog and ignores personalization from parent catalogs.
• LEAF_CLOSEST_ANCESTOR_CATALOGS: uses personalization from the lowest possible catalog in the hierarchy. If the current catalog contains personalization, it will be used. If not, it will traverse the parent structure until personalization is found.

[Marko_salonen]

thank you for the update 🙂 I realize that i did not get any notifications at all on this one so did not see my self being tagged :)

[Former Member]

Hi Guys! Thanks you all for answering and collaboration on this topic!

I wanted to share some more lines with you and to keep on discussing some more deeply questions.

I like the centralized approach in order to manager the product data, and one tenant is a better and more natural way of doing this. On the other hand, it reduces the complexity and replication between different hybris installations.

So here, I wanted to expand on some common issues in this kind of projects:

• Product replication. We are going to replicate the product data from SAP S/4HANA to hybris along with the category data and classification attribues. When we receive the product in Hybris, it will be linked to the corresponded warehouse( availability group?). Say it, we receive the product XX from Japan, so it will be added to the Product Catalog(the unique one) and then linked to it's warehouse. The warehouse_id (in sap Plant_id) should come along with the product attributes or in the additional segments data. The last is not the recommended one, since it adds some additional complexity.

• Order Management. We have discusses but not decided yet to use AOM(asynchronous order management) with direct calls to SAP S/4HANA when the customer wants to check on his historical orders and press on the details button of a specific order. This is because the SAP S/4HANA will replicate only the order statuses back to Hybris, and the order will have some more additional fields completed in SAP, that should be seen by the customer as well.

• Stock Management. We are going to replicate stock levels form SAP. Once received, the product will be assigned to the corresponding Warehouse. Initially, we will manage just one warehouse. Each warehouse will be linked to the base store of its country. So this way, we maintain just one master product catalog and multiple warehouses, each per country.

• Pricing. I have analyzed different strategies for pricing. I guess, the synchronous pricing is one of them, since it manages discounts, taxes and this information should be identical to SAP and maintained by it directly. This will reduce double maintainability, one on SAP and the other on Hybris but will increase the amount of calls to SAP S/4HANA which might be traduced to a performance decrease in some cases.

Note: in all cases where I say Asynchronous(order, pricing or whatever) we will be using the Datahub. On the other hand, while I'm referring to Synchronous, the direct calls(RFC) to the SAP ERP will be placed.

Regards, Viktor

[Former Member]

Hi, there are a lot of things which you need to take into account before to choose the solution model for you. You need to know how products come to hybris, should they be different for different countries, should the different search be configured for different countries, will you need to implement different functionality(populators, controllers and so on) for different countries. If everything is common for all countries then you can have one product catalog, one cms site and everything deployed for the master tenant(hybris architectures do not offer to use multi-tenant architecture https://wiki.hybris.com/display/hybrisALF/Multi-Tenant+Architecture)

P.S https://wiki.hybris.com/display/hybrisALF is a very cool resource which sometimes has better information than wiki, suggest to investigate it before starting development