Integration with SAP order fulfillment?

[Former Member]

Hi, forgive me in advance for my ignorance and high-level questions in this post. Though I am a good programmer, I have never used SAP before and am trying to learn as much as I can as quickly as I can.

I am the founder and director of technology of a small nonprofit, www.sirum.org, that uses an online platform to streamline medicine donation from manufacturers and hospitals to community clinics that serve the uninsured. We recently had a big break through with a number of large manufacturers that they would transition their current proprietary donation software over to us in order for us to develop a cross-manufacturing donation solution so clinics didn't have to deal with each company individually.

The catch is that I believe most if not all of these companies wanted backend integration of our service with their current SAP order fulfillment systems. The webservice SIRUM is creating will have a clinic login to our site, order the medicine they need, tell each manufacturer how much of their drugs were ordered by whom, and then have a delivery request along with the clinics address sent to their distribution center.

I haven't discussed the integration component with them in anymore detail yet, but since I have never integrated a webservice with SAP - let alone even used SAP - before I wanted to get a sense of what a multiple manufacturer webservice integration would entail. Namely,

1) would we just create a WSDL with operations that tell the manufacturer how much was ordered?

2) Since we want the manufacturer to have little or no customization work on their end is there a way to also provide them an SAP program that then take information provided by our webservice and turns it into their ordering syntax.

3) Would this latter piece depend on what modules of SAP each manufacturer has installed, or does all order fulfillment use the same SAP module/solution?

4) Would a solution involve a lot of customization from manufacturer to manufacturer? Is there a way to minimize the amount of customization without sacrificing integration?

5) Do you guys/ladies have any good ideas of any features that could be added to the base functionality (sending an order of medicine from a clinic to a manufacturer and its distribution center for fulfillment)

Thanks in advance for your time,

Adam

[former_member198308]

Hi Adam

It's very difficult to answer your questions... Anyway, I'll try.

Of course, it's possible to do integrations to SAP using web services. The web services could directry arrive to SAP or via a Middleware. The middlware could be an SAP piece of sw as PI or non SAP.

It depends on the case there are more effort to do it. The web service executed directrly in an SAP system, without middleware is more painful than with a midldeware.

The order is usually placed in SAP Material Management module, you could have problems on identify correctly the material in both systems, depends on the local legislation and if there is a standar way to call the drugs.

Regarding the customization, it really depends on each installation, if they have or not middleware, on who will make the mapping of fields, etc.

I recommend you to post the same message in a MM or Supply Chain forum, since this one is mainly for the healthcare industry solution.

With best regards

Matías

[chaiphon]

If I'm understand your question correctly, you want to send the order you receive on your web to the manufacturer. Then manufacturer will create a sales order and delivery order on their side and deliver the good to the clinic.

In this case,

1,2) It would be better for you to send the order to them instead of creating the wsdl for them to call. There is a standard format EDI for sales order that SAP use to interface with legacy system. You cna generate the data in this format and send to each manufacturer so they can configure the system on their side.

3) The module is called SAP order fullfillment or SAP order-to-cash or SAP SD (Sales & distribution). It means the same thing just some people call it differnetly. SAP SD is the common one.

4) Surely there will be some effort for each manufacture to integrate their system with you. However, If you use the standard EDI, the effort would be minimal for the manufaturer that already implement this with other partner.

5) you can pass along the address in sales order. If the manufacturer system implemented SAP SD, they should be able to create sales order, delivery order and invoice from their side.

Regards,

Chaiphon

[former_member198308]

Sorry Adam, Chaipoin is right. The solution is Sales and DIstribution SD

Sorry for the mistake.