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Author's profile photo Naresh Purohit

EC ERP Integration in a nutshell

SuccessFactors Employee central integration with SAP ERP HCM is core and comprehensive integration enabling customer to move to Employee central from ERP HCM without disruption and allowing seamless integration to core features such as payroll, time management and Organization management  . In this blog I will try to explain you in simple words the components of this integration  and why its beneficial for you to understand this irrespective of if you are an Architect, a Consultant or in sales/pre-sales role.

Delivered as productized integrations:

The term productized integrations means that these integration are delivered, maintained and supported by SAP, this means customers can use these integrations out of box and avoid investing in any custom integration unless and until the required feature is not delivered or covered by our integration+extensiblity framework (should be an exception). Having said that we are very open to feedback to incorporate any required features.

Business Scenarios:

Following business scenarios are covered by our productized integrations:

1. Initial load of HR Data from ERP to EC:  The first step/prerequisite for a continuous integration is the migration or Initial load of HR Data from ERP to EC. Our Business Integration builder in ERP provides a sophisticated way to do an initial load from ERP to EC. This integration is also used for Side by Side deployment model. Please refer to this blog for further details: Initial Load / Migration of HR Data from SAP ER… | SCN

2. Employee replication from EC to ERP: This is one of the most important integration to replicate employee data  from EC to ERP, which is needed for payroll and mini master integration. You have flexibility in this integration to define which all info types you want to replicate and define the corresponding code mappings for them. Enhancement possibilities are available using configuration or BADIS.

3. Organization data from EC to ERP: This includes both replicating organization objects such as division, department, business unit, job and position to ERP Organization structure as well as the relationships between them. Now it is also possible to replicate a custom object(MDF) in EC to be replicated as an organization unit in ERP.

4. Cost center from ERP to EC: This scenario covers integration of cost center from SAP ERP Financial system to Employee central. This integration is based on Idoc and support change pointers.

Components of the integration:

All the above mentioned integration consist of following component:

1. HCI: With 1602 the integrations are delivered by default on HCI. These integrations can be found in HCI content catalogue and are in configure only mode, this means that they cannot be edited and patches will be pushed automatically on the integration content.

2. ABAP Addon: We deliver two ABAP Addon namely ODTFINCC for cost center and PA_SE_IN for all other integrations. With each SFSF release, we release a new SP, but the backward compatibility is always maintained.

3. EC: To read/write data into EC we use ODATA APIs and Compound Employee API to read the employee data.

Monitoring:

1. Data Replication Monitor: DRM enables you to monitor end-to-end integration for both Employee Replication and Organizational assignment from EC to ERP. It is a powerful tool based on MDF and is a perfect monitoring tool for system and HR admins.

2. HCI Monitoring: You can use the HCI MPL(Message Processing Log) and Payload viewing tool(configurable parameter) in order to analyse the errors in HCI.

3. ERP: SRT_UTIL and SLG1 are the places to look for the error messages for these integrations. For Organizational object it is also now possible to see the monitoring via ABAP Web dynpro screens which can be embedded into EC using UI Mashups.

As always, please refer to our detailed and latest integration guide from this link: Integration – SAP Help Portal Page

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      12 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Luke Marson
      Luke Marson

      There is an SAP PRESS E-Bite covering setting up this data migration part of the integration:

      https://www.sap-press.com/sap-successfactors-data-migration-sap-erp-hcm-to-employee-central_4324/;

      Author's profile photo Naresh Purohit
      Naresh Purohit
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Luke,
      Thanks, I will check out this We are changing a lot in this area, especially from 1602 BIB(Business integration builder) is becoming the central configuration place.

      Best regards,
      Naresh

      Author's profile photo Smitha Kondajji
      Smitha Kondajji

      Hi Luke,

      The above-mentioned link says 'Page not found' when clicked. It would be useful to read this E-Bite. Would you mind sharing the latest link if this is still available?

      Best regards,
      Smitha

      Author's profile photo Luke Marson
      Luke Marson

      HI Smitha,

      I corrected the link so please try again.

      Best regards,

      Luke

      Author's profile photo Smitha Kondajji
      Smitha Kondajji
      Hi Luke,
      The link works fine now. Thanks for the correction.

      Best regards,
      Smitha

       

       

      Author's profile photo Luke Marson
      Luke Marson

      Hi Naresh,

      This was written based on 1608 and takes into account BIB. I'm interested to see more as it develops.

      All the best,

      Luke

      Author's profile photo Naresh Purohit
      Naresh Purohit
      Blog Post Author

      Perfect, I think this was a very good timing :-).

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Naresh,

      Thank you for your post.

      I'm little bit confussed about all the changes going around EC to ERP/Payroll integration. I'm using HCI to integrate EC and ERP.

      Is BiB going to replace the configurations made inside "Other integration settings"->"Replicating Data from EC to SAP ERP". Should we do everything inside BiB nodes?

      Looking at my current system it seems we have several places to configure Employee Master Data replication and Org Structures and Org assignments i.e.

      And How can I check my version?

      Thanks

      Author's profile photo Naresh Purohit
      Naresh Purohit
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Carlos,

      You have all valid questions. We want to bring in BIB in a non disruptive manner, this means your existing configuration option will still be valid and will work.
      At the same time BIB offers flexibility to do extensiblity without using BADIs all the time and also offers lot of flexiblity in terms of field mapping. So in case if you are in middle of a new implementation or upgrade I will propose you to have a look at BIB in detail.

      You can check your current version of PA_SE_IN Addon. The latest version is SP16.

      Best regards,
      Naresh

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Naresh,

      very informative post. As I understand, the PA_SE_IN add-on is built on web services. It's pretty solid, I must say.

      But a customer, a rather strong willed one, wants to use IDocs for EC to ERP master data integration (Core hybrid in PA_SE_IN terminology). Inspite of my "SAP standard" consulting of asking them to use PA_SE_IN, they still want to use IDOC HRMD_* (FM:IDOC_INPUT_HRMD_PAD).
      They also understand that this is going to be a custom development and they would receive no support from SAP.

      Would you recommend doing something like this?
      Kindly opine.

      Marty

      Author's profile photo Naresh Purohit
      Naresh Purohit
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Martin,

       

      sorry for the delayed response! No, we would not recommend that.

       

      Best regards,

      Naresh

      Author's profile photo Renuka Naidu
      Renuka Naidu

      Hi,

      As of today, we are using DELL Boomi to replicate data from EC to ERP, my question is if we go for BIB, do we still need to have BOOMI?

       

      Regards,