SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer Integration with SAP Business One (Part 1: Overview)

Dear customers and partners,

We’re happy to inform you about the availability of a prepackaged integration between SAP Hybris Sales Cloud (C4C Sales) and SAP Business One (B1). Below we want to provide a first glimpse of the functional scenarios, technical prerequisites and also the way how deployment and setup are planned to look like.

Before we start with the C4C integration, please find below a short introduction to SAP Business One and its role in SAP’s overall ERP solution portfolio for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME).

SAP Business One has been growing constantly in the SME space over years. Currently more than 50000 customers trust in SAP B1 and use it every day. Please find more facts and figures of B1 below.

Today SAP B1 is used in more than 150 countries and can be accessed in many different languages.

For SME companies (and LE-subsidiaries) SAP Business One provides a comprehensive set of core business processes e.g. financials, sales and distribution, purchasing, production with MRP and forecasting, service, project management and human resources. In general SAP Business One is a client-server application which runs on Microsoft SQL server or a SAP HANA database. Integration scenarios are typically set-up within the so-called Integration Framework of SAP Business One (B1i). B1i is a lean middleware which enables SAP B1 to publish or send data to external systems, and to consume or access data from external data providers using standard protocols.

Over the last months we’ve received customer requests regarding more sophisticated lead and opportunity management scenarios in SAP B1. Most of these customers wanted to have a cloud-based sales extension which should smoothly integrate with their B1 system (keep consistency in the core), but should provide state-of-the-art, mobile-ready use cases for their sales professionals. This is where SAP Hybris Sales Cloud came into play and actually was the starting point, why we decided to run an internal prototype together with a few SAP B1 customers. The feedback from the group was amazing and very positive. As mentioned above, the immediate need of those customers was mainly around account and contact management as well as the quotation-to-order process with real-time access to the B1. Please find the result of this co-innovation project below.

As mentioned above the integration comes with prepackaged content for the B1 Integration Framework (B1i). Hence B1i mainly does the technical message mapping between the SAP B1 and SAP C4C. As you can see below the technical prerequisite for such an integration is B1 version 9.1+ and SAP Hybris Sales Cloud release 1602+.

The integration content consists of 2 parts: the B1i content shipped via the SAP note 2221527 and a comprehensive How-To Guide available as download within the SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer Integration best-practice package (available since March 7th 2016).

On behalf of the SAP Business One and SAP Hybris / Cloud for Customer team, we want to THANK ALL our customers and partners who gave us their early, valuable feedback and contributed to the prototype / best practice package.

If you’re interested in more details please visit the second article about C4C-B1 integration scenarios and configuration. Also watch the recorded partner webinar sessions from March 10th (APJ/EMEA) and March 15th (NA/LATAM). Generally get up-to-speed with the C4C course on openSAP.

– Thank you.