SAP Salesforce Integration – Breaking Barriers

How SAP Salesforce Integration Will Revolutionize Your Business

Introduction

SAP and Salesforce don’t need to be introduced or explained – one is the leading ERP system in the world, and the other is the number one CRM solution. While the two SAP flavors, ECC and S/4HANA, are extremely powerful for managing business processes (sales and distribution, finance, HR, and asset management, just to name a few), Salesforce has the better and more modern cloud-based architecture and is a lot more user-friendly.

In the 2020s, we aren’t living in an isolated world anymore, where organizations can get software from just one provider. There’s no single enterprise system that rules them all. In many companies, SAP and Salesforce are used side-by-side, and they can become a power couple if they’re integrated instead of siloed. Harmonizing these two systems can elevate your business operations to new heights.

What does integration mean, anyway?

When we speak about Salesforce SAP integration, we mean connecting and combining the functionalities, data, and processes of these two separate systems to work together seamlessly as a unified solution. The ultimate goal is to make users believe they’re working in just one system—the complexity of the real world should remain hidden.

Of course, this seamlessness comes with a lot of complexity behind the curtain, but already, the architectural and technical challenge of bringing SAP and Salesforce together has been solved. A Salesforce SAP integration isn’t rocket science anymore.?

Unlocking the Full Potential - Use Cases for Salesforce SAP Integration

The following examples prove how Salesforce SAP integration can benefit your business:

Sales Cloud and Customer 360

With Sales Cloud and Customer 360, Salesforce promises its users a complete picture of its customers. Really? Without a view into the company’s ERP system, crucial data is missing – customer-specific prices, delivery status and history, invoices, credit status, and much more. Actual-vs.-forecast views are not possible without an integration to SAP or another ERP, where this data is stored and updated. Integrations allow your company to see crucial business information in real time, such as:

• Sales Order Management, including history, document flow, creation of new sales orders with live pricing, and ATP check.
• Delivery status and history
• Invoices including payment status, history, and PDF attachments of the actual invoice document from SAP BDS, DMS, or Archive Link.

Service Cloud and Field Service

Historically, companies often chose to implement their field service within SAP’s CS (customer service) module. As the Salesforce Service Cloud has become more and more powerful, many have begun to switch sides. Still, valuable data like equipment and functional locations continue to be stored in SAP. Warehouse management – a huge topic on its own – is also typically set up in SAP alongside follow-up processes such as invoicing, delivery, etc.

Taking advantage of the user-friendly Salesforce Service Cloud and its mobile app while still being able to keep warehouse management and invoicing in SAP can greatly benefit every service team.

B2B/B2C Commerce and Community

The Commerce Cloud is a great solution from Salesforce, even more so when integrated with in-store availability checks and the live pricing that makes SAP so powerful. Allowing customers to see the delivery status, download invoices, and create sales orders will lead to a much better customer experience. And it also frees your staff to concentrate on more meaningful, higher-value strategic tasks.

Industries – Manufacturing and Consumer Goods Clouds

Salesforce offers industry-specific versions of their solutions, tailored to the needs of companies in manufacturing and consumer goods. SAP does the same, so integrating the two worlds makes logical sense.?

What does this look like? In manufacturing, for example, SAP sales contracts and Salesforce sales agreements are integrated, along with the SAP run rate on orders or the account forecast.

But how do I integrate SAP with Salesforce?

There are different levels of integration that you can implement:

• Level 1 integration:?Custom development. You roll up your sleeves and you write the whole damn integration yourself. Connection and error handling, logging, monitoring, security, protocol bridging, data transformation, delta determination, and a hundred other topics. This is a dream for every architect and developer, but a nightmare for every organization. Who’s going to test and support this approach over the next few years?
• Level 2 integration: IPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service). Most larger enterprises have some kind of integration platform in place to manage their APIs internally and externally, and platforms like these can further be used to integrate Salesforce with SAP. They typically cover all the technical aspects that you need to worry about with a level 1 integration, allowing you to focus on developing key business logic and application content. The IPaaS solutions that are most familiar today include Mulesoft, SAP CPI, Jitterbit, and Informatica.?
• Level 3 integration: SaaS (Software as a Service). SaaS providers offer pre-defined integration content that addresses the technical aspects of integration while also robustly handling key business processes. Providers maintain the integration for you and offer best practices for every business process out of the box. SaaS has a clear advantage over other levels of integration: project durations are shorter and risks are much lower. SaaS solutions can run as a standalone or on top of an IPaaS platform like Mulesoft or SAP CPI. Vigience Overcast is a great example of a level 3 SaaS integration.

But wait…copying all this data between SAP/Salesforce and keeping it in sync sounds like a nightmare.

Oh yes, it is a nightmare, which is why we should all try to avoid it as much as possible. Ideally, the integration between SAP and Salesforce should happen on a process level and in real time.

In general, three types of integration can be achieved:

• Data Synchronization. Copying data between systems, bi-directionally to keep important master data like accounts, products, and assets consistent in both systems.
• Real-Time Access. Getting data only when it needs to be displayed or processed in real time while keeping the business logic fundamentally within SAP. For example, pricing rules from SAP can’t be re-created in Salesforce, and availability across a large number of storage locations can’t all be kept in sync between systems. In these cases, real-time integrations are a must-have!
• Hybrid Integration. A mix of data synchronization and real-time access that replicates only the core information and fetches everything else in real time.

A general rule of thumb for integrations: try to do as much as possible in real time.

I still don’t get it. Why all this trouble integrating Salesforce with SAP?

The short answer is “Process Automation.”

Here’s the long answer. If you run Salesforce and SAP in parallel, your processes don’t stop at system boundaries. Your processes will inevitably span across systems, meaning you’ll only get the full potential of the systems you’re running when you integrate them at the process level. That’s the holy grail of efficiency.

The lead-to-cash workflow offers a great example. The lead and opportunity are typically in Salesforce, while the customer data, quote, and sales order can be found in either system. The delivery documents and invoices, on the other hand, are typically stored in SAP. Without an integration, the process is disjointed, creating the need for cumbersome, manual work and increasing the risk of errors day after day.

The same challenge exists with service processes, where Salesforce offers a phenomenal solution within the Service Cloud. Crucially, key information and parts of this process reside in SAP: product availability, customer-specific prices for services and spare parts, and many other considerations. So without an integration, your service business will never be as efficient as it could be.

What are the best practices for SAP Salesforce Integration?

Great question. Here are 10 things to consider:

1. Define clear integration goals and objectives to ensure alignment between Salesforce and SAP systems.
2. Conduct a thorough analysis of data mapping, transformation requirements,??and what needs to be optimized between systems to ensure seamless data synchronization.?
3. Implement robust security measures, such as encryption and access controls, to protect sensitive data during integration.
4. Establish a scalable architecture that can accommodate future growth and changes in both Salesforce and SAP systems.
5. Perform comprehensive testing to validate the integration setup and identify and resolve any potential issues or errors.
6. Develop a detailed integration roadmap and implementation plan that considers dependencies, timelines, and resource allocation.
7. Establish data governance practices to maintain data quality and consistency across Salesforce and SAP systems.
8. Provide training and support to users to ensure they understand the integrated processes and can effectively utilize the integrated systems.
9. Establish monitoring and error-handling mechanisms to proactively identify and address integration failures or discrepancies.
10. Regularly review and optimize the integration setup to leverage new features, enhancements, and updates in both Salesforce and SAP platforms.

The bad news is that an SAP integration can be complex, expensive, and risky. The good news? We at Vigience have baked our extensive experience and integration best practices into Overcast and our implementation methodology. We apply what we’ve learned from countless integration projects to ensure you’ll have many fewer problems to worry about as a customer.

Where is the journey going? What does the future look like?

A big part of the future is already here: pre-defined integrations from Overcast that can be implemented in a matter of days. We’re constantly enabling new business processes that would be impossible to imagine and set up without Overcast. With an integration solution like Vigience Overcast, you can quickly go from siloed to success.

If you want to learn more about SAP Salesforce Integration, you can read my article at Salesforce Ben titled “Best Practices for Integrating Salesforce With SAP” or my blog about?SAP Salesforce Integration?on the Vigience homepage.