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