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SAP S/4HANA Cloud Integration Checklist

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Active Participant
‎2017 Jun 09 11:51 PM
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Last modified @Sept 13th, 2019

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Integration Options


Integration is a key enabler for the digital transformation of organizations. The quicker and better enterprises can integrate, the farther ahead of their competition they will be.  Hence, we are offering following types of integration that suit our customer needs.



The following from Sven explains the various integration options and benefits very well.

 



Whenever you have an integration requirement in mind, check if it is already offered as an SAP Best Practice.  If you find a match, then the time and effort it takes to implement is significantly less than doing everything from scratch. In the following video, my colleagues and I explain how to find S/4HANA Cloud Integration Best Practices in the SAP Best Practice Explorer.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Integration: Where to Start?




In a nutshell, SAP Best Practices are some of your best friends on your S/4HANA Cloud implementation journey.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Integration Checklist


In order to make things clear, I put together a step-by-step check list that may come in handy whether you are simply evaluating or about to implement.



If you can’t find a match, check if it is on the road-map or in the innovation repository IFR.  You could avoid custom development effort if something is available in the road-map.

If the road-map also comes empty, then you are in the territory of customer integration development. In order to be successful, first you need to ensure right APIs available and then decide whether you need to use a middleware (SAP Cloud Platform Integration or SAP PI) or direction connectivity is possible.



SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides following several types of APIs even though white listed public API are preferred for custom integrations.

SAP Public APIs:

SAP releases APIs such as OData/SOAP for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and other SAP Cloud Products to enable customers digitizing their business to securely connect apps to other systems.

Published on SAP API Business Hub

CDS Views

SAP releases CDS Views for SAP S/4HANA Cloud to read data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud system.

They can be consumed as read only OData services using custom communication arrangements or consumed in SAP Cloud Platform using View Replication

More info available in SAP help & blog

Business Events

Business Event Handling is a system-wide standardized event mechanism for business objects across SAP S/4HANA Cloud applications

Support event-driven architecture for seamless communication across different platforms

Business Event Handling

BAPIs/IDOCs

Released BAPIs/IDOCs can be used to connect SAP S/4HANA Cloud with SAP on-premise applications only.

Requires the use of Cloud connector.

Exceptions for 3rd party need to be approved by SAP

Where to find SAP S/4HANA Cloud white listed APIs is well explained by my colleague Andreas Muno in the below video.



One of the nice feature of SAP API Business Hub is that, it will let you try the API without leaving the page where you find them.  For more info, please read the following blog.

Key blogs describing how to consume API's from SAP S/4HANA Cloud and API Business Hub are listed below.

Should you still not yield a result, request APIs or extensions to be built using the Customer Influence Site SAP S/4HANA Cloud Integration

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Connectivity Options:


SAP S/4HANA Cloud and its APIs support various flexible connectivity options to meet customer's needs.  Some key options are listed below

  1. Direct or point to point Integration

    • Go-to connectivity type

    • Easy to setup

    • For SAP out-of-the-box solutions (Eg: ML use cases)



  2. Via SAP Cloud Connector

    • Relevant only for SAP S/4HANA Cloud integration with SAP applications on Premise (Eg: 2-tier)

    • Secured by “lightweight VPN” connection

    • Bi-direction RFC and HTTP calls via tunnel connection



  3. Via SAP Cloud Platform Integration

    • Preferred option for Cloud to Cloud Integrations

    • Accelerate implementations using prepackaged integration content available (iFlows)

    • Cloud platform operated by SAP, monitoring by customer

    • Extensibility possible



  4. Using other or on-prem middleware such as SAP Process Orchestration

    • On premise integration landscape, but also possible for on premise to cloud

    • On premise installation

    • Operated by customer




My colleagues Marcel/Mert explain how to integrate SAP S/4HANA Cloud with SAP Cloud Platform Integration(3rd option from above) in the following blogs.

Tools of trade used in the above checklist:


 

My recorded session from SAP TechEd Las Vegas 2018 on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Integration Stategy is listed below.



Stay tuned for more.

 
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