SAP Marketing Cloud integration for actual and committed spend with S/4HANA

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Overview

This blog post provides information about the current delivered integration for actual and committed spend with SAP ERP and well as some information on how to integrate with S/4HANA, as part of an implementation project.

Standard integration with SAP ERP

SAP Marketing Cloud delivers a standard integration with SAP ERP for Actual and Committed Spend. This use case is part of the Marketing Planning and Performance scenario available in our SAP Marketing Cloud online documentation. The following diagram provides an overview of the process:



It is important to note that a Project in SAP ERP represents a campaign in SAP Marketing Cloud and that a WBS element represents the spend item of a campaign in SAP Marketing Cloud:



This integration scenario uses SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) and iFlows to exchange data between SAP Marketing Cloud and SAP ERP.  This diagram provides a high-level overview of the integration:



Refer to the online SAP Marketing Cloud integration documentation for more details.

Note that the integration is bi-directional:

• SAP Marketing Cloud to SAP ERP. This is the outbound direction, from SAP Marketing Cloud’s perspective. This direction creates the Projects and the WBS elements in SAP ERP.


• SAP ERP to SAP Marketing Cloud. This is the inbound direction, from SAP Marketing Cloud’s perspective. This direction sends the actual and committed spend to SAP Marketing Cloud.

Integrating with S/4HANA On-Premise

SAP Marketing Cloud currently doesn’t offer a standard integration with S/4HANA on-premise. However, it is possible to easily enable the outbound integration with S/4HANA on-premise, using the standard iFlows artefacts of the standard integration and adapt them to connect to S/4HANA. Indeed, the SAP ERP Web Services used in the standard integration are also available in S/4HANA system. The Web Services are:

• ProjectERPCreateRequestConfirmation_In_V1 (PROJECTERPCRTRC1)


• ProjectERPUpdateRequestConfirmation_In (PROJECTUPDRC)


• ProjectERPByIDQueryResponse_In_V1 (PROJECTERPIDQR1)

The Web Services are configured in S4/HANA using SOAMANAGER. Note that you must configure project system in S/4HANA, as you would have to do it in SAP ERP. Please refer to S/4HANA documentation on Project System.

If you have a more complex integration, which involves custom fields and custom logic, you can use CPI and the iFlows to do more complex mapping. You can also create your own function modules on S/4HANA side and generate Web Services from it to connect to CPI. Refer to this blog post from the SAP Community for more information https://blogs.sap.com/2017/06/19/how-easy-it-is-to-consume-function-module-as-web-service-and-connec....

For the inbound integration, you can bring the actual and committed spend to SAP Marketing Cloud using the standard API CUAN_ACTUAL_IMPORT. For more details, refer to our online documentation Actual and Committed Spend Data | SAP Help Portal. This implies that you must create a report in S/4HANA to collect the actual and committed spend and call the SAP Marketing Cloud API to update SAP Marketing Cloud.

Integrating with S/4HANA Cloud

SAP Marketing Cloud currently doesn’t offer a standard integration with S/4HANA Cloud. However, S/4HANA Cloud has released APIs for Project System which could be used to enable the outbound integration. See the standard SAP documentation in the SAP API Hub. While, we never tried it, it should possible to use those APIs and adapt the iFlows artefacts of the standard integration to connect to S/4HANA Cloud. Note that to call those APIs in S/4HANA Cloud, you must configure the communication scenario ID SAP_COM_0308. See the standard SAP documentation

For the inbound integration, it must be checked if S/4HANA Cloud has APIs and the functionality to retrieve the actual and committed spend so that it can be integrated to an external system, like SAP Marketing Cloud.

Conclusion

1. It is possible to enable the outbound integration for the Actual and Committed Spend between SAP Marketing Cloud and S/4HANA On-Premise, using the standard iFlows by connecting to a S/4HANA system instead of SAP ERP system.


2. It should be possible enable the outbound integration for the Actual and Committed Spend between SAP Marketing Cloud and S/4HANA Cloud, by adapting the standard iFlows to use the S/4HANA APIs.

We hope that this blog post is useful for your implementation projects. Don’t hesitate to comment and bring your perspective. Your ideas together with tips and tricks related to this topic are most welcome.

Finally, I would like to thank Sandeep Singh, Principal Architect from SAP Expert Services, and Marc Dorais, senior developer, for their contribution to this blog post. Sandeep participated to implementation projects that integrated SAP Marketing Cloud with S/4HANA.