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Author's profile photo Marcel Wolf

SAP S/4HANA Cloud EDI Integration Strategy

Electronic data interchange (EDI) is a concept of interchanging business-related documents electronically. As EDI has a history of more than 30 years many de facto standards have established e.g. X12, EDIFACT and ODETTE based on specific industry needs. Due to the fact that miscellaneous companies rely on communication through EDI SAP is glad to offer two different ways for customers to benefit from APIs in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. In dedicated projects customer can implement them to address their specific EDI requirements.

EDI integration based on SAP S/4HANA Cloud SOAP APIs

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, more modern, extensible and structurally simplified SOAP APIs are being provided and maintained by SAP on the SAP API Business Hub. Furthermore, SAP provides a new crowd-based machine learning tool called integration content advisor (ICA) running on the SAP Cloud Platform Integration which now supports creating and maintaining B2B integration content much faster and more efficiently then ever before. For more details on the ICA visit this blog: https://blogs.sap.com/2018/01/19/announcement-new-integration-content-advisor-for-sap-cloud-platform-integration/

The following illustration explains the described the EDI integration based on SAP S/4HANA Cloud SOAP APIs:

 

Check out the newly released scope items for customers using EDI with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, 2EJ for procurement https://rapid.sap.com/bp/scopeitems/2EJ , 2EL for sales APIs https://rapid.sap.com/bp/scopeitems/2EL and the scope item https://rapid.sap.com/bp/#/browse/scopeitems/2MB for electronic payment advice integration.

EDI Integration based on SAP S/4HANA Cloud buyer-side integration with SAP Ariba solutions

Right now, SAP S/4HANA Cloud is integrated to the Ariba Network on the buyer side, with procurement functions.  The respective integration scenarios can be found on the SAP Best Practices Explorer. SAP Ariba offers pre-deifned fixed mappings with some extension possibilities to various EDI standards to support Ariba purchasing processes.The Integration setup and the currently supported X12 and EDIFACT standards including the architecture is visualized in this picture:

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      21 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Mark Nolff
      Mark Nolff

      Are the any plans to offer REST/JSON based equivalents of the SOAP API's? I only ask because it seems that many organizations are moving away from SOAP to REST for API architectures. If a more structured API with a tighter contract is required in these use cases I could understand why SOAP might be a better fit.

      Author's profile photo Marcel Wolf
      Marcel Wolf
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Mark,

      as in RESTful APIs like OData the client has to initiate the data push from the SAP S/4HANA Cloud system e.g. by subscribing to changes. Furthermore, SOAP is more common when it comes to data exchange in stateful & heavy weight environments like A2A(Application to Application) and B2B(Business to Business). Based on this facts we focus on asynchronous messaging via SOAP APIs in EDI scenarios.

      Regards,

      Marcel

      Author's profile photo Andreas Muno
      Andreas Muno

      Mark, with SAP S/4HANA, whether in the cloud or on premise, customers can chose which of the available APIs fit their business purposes best. We offer industry standard OData or SOAP APIs, and proprietary but globally well-known SAP legacy APIs (BAPI/IDoc). We won't restrict customers' choice here, we do plan to replace our proprietary legacy APIs over time with industry standard APIs and business events (industry standards AsyncAPI and Cloud Events), therefore we'd like to keep users of legacy APIs aware of their planned deprecation and recommend successor APIs (see this SAP note). We try to develop APIs for specific purposes, which may or may not result in equivalence in different types of APIs for the same object.

      Author's profile photo Philippe Addor
      Philippe Addor

      Andreas, the mentioned note has been removed. Do you have an updated one or can tell more about SAP's current strategy for this?

      Author's profile photo Hermann Ebert
      Hermann Ebert

      Hi Marcel,

      Thanks for the update. Do you know if it is planned to provide the EDI interface in the S/4 OnPremise Edition as well?

      In the 2nd picture it is mentioned that the

      Customer owns and manages their own mappings built in SAP Cloud Platform integration (or other platform)

      Could I interpret the "or other platform" in a way that customers are able to use their own EDI systems?

      Thanks in advance & kind regards,
      Hermann

      Author's profile photo Marcel Wolf
      Marcel Wolf
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Hermann,

      please see my answers below:

      1. yes it is planned to delivery the APIs for SAP S/4HANA on-premise as well with later releases.
      2. as the EDI Integration Strategy for SAP S/4HANA Cloud is to use public released APIs you can use any system to create the mappings if this tool is capable to deal with SOAP APIs.

      Kind regards,

      Marcel

      Author's profile photo Sijin Chandran
      Sijin Chandran

      Hi Marcel,

      Can you please provide any insight on the below query raised by me related to EDI ,

      https://answers.sap.com/questions/482029/how-to-setup-edi-from-s4-hana-cloud-to-sap-cloud-p.html

      In our example we want to trigger OData  API for Sales Order creation from S4 Hana Cloud to SAP HCI.

      Thanks,

      Sijin

      Author's profile photo Marcel Wolf
      Marcel Wolf
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Sijin,

      please check the scope item 2EL including the communication scenario SAP_COM_0223 which offers you a outbound interface Sales Order Confirmation. This is a SOAP API which fits perfectly into your use case.

      Regards,

      Marcel

      Author's profile photo Sijin Chandran
      Sijin Chandran

      Hi Marcel,

      First very thanks for your time and response. Apologize for replying late.

      We are actually heading up for an Integration Project using HCI and not yet received S4 Hana Tenant and very new to S4 Hana as well.

      So with reply to your response I have below queries :

      Can we get the required task using IDOC Configuration in S4 Hana Cloud ? If yes then we can get all details in segments which then can be consumed from HCI Sender end and we can build the Receiver End payload inside IFlows.

      Or Else If IDOC option is not feasible then the suggestion which you have provided might be the apt option to try with.

      Can you please confirm on the above two queries which popped up in mind.

      And also can you please guide from where you browsed and found out this "outbound interface" SAP_COM_0223 , I was not able to find anything like this in api.sap.com.

      Thanks,

      Sijin

      Author's profile photo Marcel Wolf
      Marcel Wolf
      Blog Post Author

       

      Hi Sijin,

      you can find the outbound interface for Sales Order Confirmation in the best practices explorer documentation in the scope item 2EL. This solution uses SOAP interfaces and does not contain and there is no association to IDocs.

      Just search for 2EL on this website: https://rapid.sap.com/bp

      After setting up the communication arrangement in SAP S/4HANA Cloud you need to connect to the SAP Cloud Platform Integration in your case (as described here: https://blogs.sap.com/2018/03/03/integrate-sap-s4hana-cloud-with-sap-cloud-platform-integration-using-soap-apis/).

      The API will soon be published on the API Business Hub but are available since 1711 release in your SAP S/4HANA Cloud system.

      Kind Regards,

      Marcel

      Author's profile photo Sijin Chandran
      Sijin Chandran

      Hi Marcel,

      Very thanks for your valuable inputs.

      Much appreciated.

      Thanks,

      Sijin

      Author's profile photo Sijin Chandran
      Sijin Chandran

      Hi Marcel,

      I have setup a Communication Arrangement using the Communication Scenario ID you suggested.

      Is there any provision in S4 Hana Cloud using which we can check what is the Outbound SOAP message being passed using this Communication Arrangement. Just to ensure its working properly from the S4 Hana Cloud side.

      Thanks,

      Sijin

      Author's profile photo Sijin Chandran
      Sijin Chandran

      Hi Marcel,

       

      As suggested by you created a Communication Arrangement using Communication Scenario "SAP_COM_0223".

      And provided the Service URL here the same as "End point" for SOAP Sender side in HCI.

      But still with creation of each and every Sale Order in S4 Hana Cloud its not pushing the data to above Service URL i.e. HCI End point URL for Sender side.

      Can you please suggest what I might be missing ?

      Thanks,

      Sijin

      Author's profile photo Marcel Wolf
      Marcel Wolf
      Blog Post Author

       

      Hi Sijin,

      please have a look at the setup guide of scope item 2EL: https://rapid.sap.com/bp/#/browse/scopeitems/2EL

      You might be missing the setting in the output management.

      Kind Regards,

      Marcel

      Author's profile photo Michael Jolton
      Michael Jolton

      Do you know if there are any plans to release an API to support EDI 830?

      Author's profile photo Marcel Wolf
      Marcel Wolf
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Michael,

      you can find all upcoming API releases on the SAP S/4HANA Cloud roadmap:

      https://www.sap.com/products/roadmaps.html?sort=title_asc&search=S/4HANA+Cloud#pdf-asset=d6cd955d-c37c-0010-82c7-eda71af511fa&page=1

       

      Kind Regards,

      Marcel

      Author's profile photo Eugene De Lattes
      Eugene De Lattes

       

      A quick question. Does S/4HC have the same setting called "EDI Partner" or Partner Profile settings like in ECC or the configuration is done differently? If there's a Fiori App for Partner Profile settings, what Business Catalog this app belongs to?

      Author's profile photo Andreas Muno
      Andreas Muno

      Eugene, in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, we do not have the same settings like in ECC. Instead we use communication management combining (technical) user or certificates, communication system and communication scenarios which contain APIs into so-called Communication Arrangements. See this help page for details.

      Author's profile photo Balaji Ganapathiraman
      Balaji Ganapathiraman

      Hi Mark,

      I have a scenario where we want to send the purchase order messages from S4HANA STE system to the EDI subsystem (and then to the vendors) via the API calls. There is no middleware used, customer does not want to use IDOCs.

      Traditionally we used to set an output type, use EDI as the output medium, send the ORDERS IDOC to the EDI sub-system.

      With my scenario in mind, here are the questions I have.

      • Can the PO output message be still triggered via EDI output medium?
      • Are there standard ODATA or APIs available to send the PO output messages?

      Could you provide me with ideas on how we can achieve this? Appreciate your response on this.

      Regards / Balaji

      Author's profile photo Channu Kambalyal
      Channu Kambalyal

      About S4Hana - Cloud Platform Integration with EDI - X12 & EDIFACT Pre-Integrated content to integrate with EDI Partners.....

      I have not seen any experienced vendors who can deliver integrations on SAP-CPI-EDI.

      Any thoughts on experenced vendors who can take up this task?

      Author's profile photo Mike Kersels
      Mike Kersels

      Hi Channu.

      Highview Solutions is a long time SAP partner in the middleware space.  in 2020 we ICC certified our VistaChain solution with S/4HANA Cloud, which also replicates and stores EDI data on a private Blockchain network.  This architecture was designed in conjunction with SAP and built under Partner Co-Innovation.  Full data transparency and non-repudiation with all trading partners and makes for an excellent dispute resolution tool.

      Highview is also an EDI VAN which provides great flexibility for adding more trading partners.  With the goal of finally commoditizing EDI, our pricing is $99 per month for unlimited data transfer to unlimited trading partners.  Highview sets up and manages all connections/maps for customers.  Any necessary managed services are also charged at $99 per hour.  We have free interconnects to OpenText, SPS Commerce, TrueCommerce, IBM Sterling, etc.

      You can find more information by going to www.hellohighview.com.  There are existing community set ups on our site.  On our site you can also purchase Highview services through Amazon and connect to many others.

      Mike