11.7 Integration: ISA-M, SAP Integration Suite, Prepackaged Content, and Monitoring

Integration: ISA-M, SAP Integration Suite, Prepackaged Content, and Monitoring

Order to cash rarely runs in one system alone: employee data may come from an HR system, customer interactions from a CRM, and delivery data may go to a logistics partner (section 7.6). The S4C03 unit Setting Up Integrations explains how integrations are planned, which content and tools exist, and how they are monitored.

Planning with the Integration Solution Advisory Methodology (ISA-M)

Integrations connect applications on different platforms to send data or adapt processes. The course example: SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central is the HR system of record, and employees created there should appear in SAP S/4HANA as users who can be assigned permissions.

The first list of integrations comes from the Digital Discovery Assessment in the Discover phase. It is only a starting point, because one person rarely remembers every application that exchanges data with the ERP; fit-to-standard workshops usually uncover more. ISA-M helps customers shape an integration strategy and covers all integration styles: process, data, user experience, Internet of Things, and analytics. Its resources:

• The Integration Planning and Documentation Template, and the newer Integration Assessment, which walks through the template in a guided way.
• The CIO Guide: Process and Data Integration in Hybrid Landscapes.
• The SAP Business Accelerator Hub with prepackaged content.

SAP's integration principles, as listed in the course: guided setup with the free Cloud Integration Automation Service (CIAS); integration packages, APIs, and other resources from SAP and partners on the SAP Business Accelerator Hub; open integration through public APIs for third-party applications and extensions; holistic integration through ISA-M; and AI-driven integration, for example the crowd-based machine learning of the Integration Advisor for B2B and A2A content.

SAP Integration Suite on SAP BTP

All of SAP's prepackaged integrations run in SAP Integration Suite on SAP BTP. The services covered in the course:

The SAP Discovery Center describes all SAP BTP services, estimates their cost, and offers missions to try them.

Using Prepackaged Integration Content

1. SAP Signavio Process Navigator: SAP Best Practices processes with "integration" in the title contain the setup instructions.
2. SAP Help Portal: the integration section of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition documentation lists further content.
3. Cloud Integration Automation Service (CIAS): check first whether the scenario is supported. CIAS is free but needs a one-time subscription setup, and it runs on SAP BTP. It is started with the Plan for Cloud Integration Scenario app, either from SAP Cloud ALM for Implementation or from the Maintenance Planner in SAP for Me (Services & Support → ALM). It offers a guided workflow with semi-automated tasks, which use customer-specific data such as tenant URLs, and manual tasks, which show the relevant excerpt of the setup guide. Tasks can be assigned to roles, so the person with the right permissions executes each one, and CIAS records who completed them.
4. SAP Business Accelerator Hub (formerly SAP API Business Hub): a public catalog of APIs, events, integration packages, and other content from SAP and partners. Its APIs are documented in the vendor-neutral open API format and follow a deprecation policy for versioning and compatibility. The course calls these integrations customer-driven: customer developers should help design and build them so that they can maintain and monitor them through future upgrades, while the consultant shares the available content and tracks each integration requirement from the workshops in SAP Cloud ALM until it is resolved.

Monitoring with SAP Cloud ALM for Operations

SAP Cloud ALM for Operations is included in SAP Enterprise Support for cloud editions, so its apps are available at no extra cost. SAP systems are added as a managed landscape in the Landscape Management app, and external systems can be registered with External API Management. The monitoring areas:

Worked Example: An Integration Requirement from a Sales Workshop

In a fit-to-standard workshop for order to cash, the customer's sales experts explain that new customers are first created in a separate CRM system and that the order confirmation must also go to a logistics provider.

1. The consultant records two integration requirements in SAP Cloud ALM, because neither was listed in the Digital Discovery Assessment.
2. The integration architect checks ISA-M and the SAP Business Accelerator Hub for prepackaged content and APIs, for example business partner and sales order APIs.
3. If an SAP Best Practices integration scenario exists, its setup instructions in SAP Signavio Process Navigator are followed, ideally with a CIAS workflow; the integration runs in SAP Integration Suite.
4. After go-live, failed messages appear in Integration & Exception Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM for Operations.