SAP Salesforce Integration – The Ultimate Guide

Enterprises are increasingly adopting best-of-breed solutions for their respective business functions. It is common to see companies implementing MS Teams / Slack for internal collaboration, Workday for HRMS and Salesforce for their marketing, sales and customer support functions. SAP remains an undisputed leader in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) category. While using the best-of-the-breed solutions, it becomes imperative to integrate the applications so that information exchange is streamlined. Hence when it comes to integrating ERP and CRM applications for a mid to large-sized company, we are often talking about SAP Salesforce integration. Such integration helps empower the customer-facing roles with the powerhouse that SAP itself is. Information regarding product launches, price changes, customers and much more can be exchanged so that there is only a single version of the truth.

Why do Businesses Need SAP Salesforce Integration

Delivering an effective and engaging customer experience plays a key role in ensuring customer loyalty and retention. With the complexity and volume of data processed by SAP ERPs and Salesforce for their respective operations, it is prudent to maintain seamless data exchange between the platforms to ensure streamlined business workflows. These are the day-to-day examples that highlight the importance of such an integration.

Quote Accuracy:

Tanya is creating a quotation within Salesforce for ABC Corp, one of their big distributors. However, she is not sure whether the price reflected in the platform is the exact customer-specific price for ABC. She knows that being a large customer some price updates were done within SAP. Also, previously she added a discontinued product model to the quote since it was still active within Salesforce. She doesn’t want to repeat the mistake this time. The key learning is that SAP’s master data and pricing information play an important base for the Sales team to transact with confidence on Salesforce.

Account Receivable:

Ryan is a sales rep working for a company dealing in industrial parts. Outstanding payments have been one of the top concerns for the top management. Ryan has been asked by his regional manager to follow up on invoices pending payment during the customer visits. He doesn’t have visibility of the Account statement from SAP and is unsure of recent payments made by the customer. He usually coordinates with Sarah, the AR clerk to get the updated information. Having real-time visibility without depending on offline coordination is a key to an efficient order to cash cycle as well as productivity.

Service Installation and Warranty Information:

Best Coffee Inc, install coffee vending machines for corporates and offer a 2-year warranty on service and labor. Nate is a customer service representative who works on responding to customer complaints. Nate doesn’t know the warranty terms defined in SAP and needs to check by logging into SAP to get relevant details. After punching in a service request, he needs to create a notification and work orders. Nate’s service engineering team put in a timesheet which then feeds into the Service order for billing to the end customer. By having an installed base within Salesforce, customer service reps can do a much better job. They can search based on serial numbers, check warranty terms and engage with customer support requests in a far more efficient manner.

Promotions and Discounts:

A merchandise distribution company runs Thanksgiving deals 1 week before the holidays. Prices in SAP are set to change automatically on this date. Mike handles B2B Channel sales within Salesforce. Scheduled events change business data. Having an SAP Salesforce Connector can sync these changes with the other application.

SAP Editions – Impact on the SAP Integration Process

Based on the industry vertical, enterprise size, and functional role, both SAP and Salesforce offer their customers a wide range of solutions.

SAP S/4/ Hana:

?This is undoubtedly the future for all enterprise customers using SAP. It comes with a lot of configurable features using which you can define Sales, Logistics, Finance and Human Capital Management functions.

SAP ECC / All in One:

?It is an older version of S4 and the majority of SAP’s enterprise, this is being widely used by companies across the globe. However, it is being upgraded to S4 in many instances. SAP claims that it will support ECC till 2027.?

SAP Business One:

This mid-segment offering from SAP, runs on the Microsoft technology stack. It is built on .NET and runs on MS SQL or HANA databases.?

SAP ByD or Business ByDesign:

Business ByDesign is small and mid-segment SaaS-based offering from SAP. It is a hosted solution that provides templates for businesses to define and execute their processes. This platform?supports SOAP API ?and supports various methods out of the box.

Top Considerations for SAP Salesforce Integration

SAP and Salesforce are not only fundamentally different in their technical architecture but also distinct in terms of their philosophy and the business function they support. The former is supposed to be the financial & operation backbone of the organization, latter is meant to be an agile CRM platform that can be deployed and implemented quickly for customer-facing teams. Let us look at what is recommended when it comes to making SAP and Salesforce work in tandem.

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