How to synchronize time-series master data from SAP ECC to SAP IBP via Supply Chain Integration add-on and CPI-DS

Integration is an import part for a plan system. Usually we need to synchronize master data such as product, location, resource etc. and transactional data like sales order, planned order, product order etc. For SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization, we use CIF to handle these, and for SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain solution, SAP provides a ‘SAP ERP, supply chain integration add-on for SAP Integrated Business Planning’  to do the data synchronization. The add-on is suitable for both time-series data and order-based data.

In this blog, you will get the introduction of add-on’s overview and an example about how to use add-on to synchronize time-series master data from SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) to SAP IBP.

Supply chain integration add-on for SAP IBP overview

Let’s start from the system landscape.

a. The add-on will collect master/transactional data through application and store these data in staging tables. You can find these staging tables by searching ‘/IBP/*EXT’

b. For order-based data, add-on provides some function modules to connect with data provisioning agent, and the agent will use OpenAPI to synchronize data with SAP IBP through SAP HANA smart data integration.

c. For time-series data, with SAP IBP inbound scenario, add-on provides some data sources’ extractors which let SAP Cloud Platform Integration for data services (CPI-DS) to get data and send to SAP IBP. With SAP IBP outbound scenario, it will provide some web services to handle it.

You can find these data sources under application component ‘SCM-IBP-INT-ECC-TS-IO’ and ‘SCM-IBP-INT-ECC-TS’.

Tips:

Make sure to active these data sources, after the add-on is installed.

Master data’s data sources are under application component ‘SCM-IBP-INT-ECC-TS-IO’, transactional data are under ‘SCM-IBP-INT-ECC-TS’.

After we have some preliminary knowledge of the add-on, imagine a simple scenario, planner want to synchronize SAP ECC’s plant data to SAP IBP. Let’s have a look at this solution step by step.

1. Define plants

Use T-Code: /IBP/ECC_INT_MOD1 to define plants which you want to send to SAP IBP. The add-on will not synchronize plants which are not in the configuration table.

Tips:

Add prefixes ‘/n’ or ‘/o’ when use the T-Code which have prefixes ‘/IBP’.

2.Integrate Locations to SAP IBP

Use T-Code: /IBP/ECC_INT_LOC to initial load of the selected plants.

Plants, customer, vendor are defined as location in SAP IBP. This program can collect all these three types of locations’ data. In this example, we just need to set plant’s transfer mode as initial load.

After the execution of the program is completed, we can check table ‘/IBP/LOC_EXT’.

The add-on also provides a BAdI ‘/IBP/BADI_ES_ETS_SELECTION’ for enhancements.

If there is no customization requirement, the work of SAP ECC side has been completed.

Note: For now, the plants data only exists in SAP ECC staging table ‘/IBP/LOC_EXT’ and has not been synchronized to SAP IBP. CPI-DS will call ‘/IBP/LOCATION_ATTR’’s extraction to read the staging table.

Tips:

For customer, vendor and material data, we can use BTE to immediate, automatic transfer of all the changes to the staging tables which will be transferred to SAP IBP.

But if plant has been changed in SAP ECC, the changes will not synchronize to table ‘/IBP/LOC_EXT’ automatically. We have to re-execution ‘/IBP/ECC_INT_LOC’ to transfer the change to the staging table. That means maybe we should define a period background job to handle it.

3.Use template to create a task

Use template ‘IBP_MD_S4_ERP_AddOn’ to create a task.

Open the task which we have created, you will find there are some dataflows in it. These dataflows are preset for planning area ‘SAPIBP1’. If you want to transfer data to your own planning area, you need to change the source table.

You can get source table name’s hints in the annotation.

For this example, master data type is ‘INTLOCATION’.

So we need to change the data flow like below.

4.Define global variables

Move to task’s execution properties sheet, there’s some global variables which need to define values.

4.1 $G_LOAD_DATE

Usually we give SYSUTCDATE() to this variable. If $G_LOAD_DATE is null, CPI-DS will occur ‘BATCH_TIMESTAMP NULL’ error.

4.2 $G_PLAN_AREA

We need to fill planning area ID in this variable.

4.3 $G_BATCH_COMMAND

The following values are supported for this variable:

• ‘INSERT_UPDATE’ (inserts or updates the selected entries, but does not delete any entries)
• ‘DELETE’ (deletes the selected entries)
• ‘REPLACE’ (deletes all entries, and replaces them with the selected ones)

After finish these steps, we can put the dataflow to a process and run it.

You can check the plants data in SAP IBP excel add-in.

Hopefully, this article will help you better understand how to synchronize time-series master data from SAP ECC to SAP IBP via supply chain integration add-on and CPI-DS.

You can refer to the SAP help portal as below for more information.

Locations via Extractors: https://help.sap.com/viewer/ccfe175310e04be9b38087c8df73974d/1.1%20SP11/en-US/e235699350db4d8794ebe3d3314d75b0.html