Announcement: SAP Trading Partner Management and B2B Monitoring brand new capabilities of SAP Integration Suite is released!

Introduction

The Integration Suite family extended it´s B2B offering with a new capability and features:

• SAP Trading Partner Management (TPM)
• B2B Monitoring of the designed scenarios deployed via TPM

This new capability provides a Trading Partner centered view of Business-to-Business integration scenarios. This new design time capability is tailored to meet the needs of your B2B data  exchange such as the individual definition and configuration of specific electronic exchange of business data between you and your trading partners.

TPM a new capability of SAP Integration Suite

B2B users have different levels of requirements for data exchange starting from the different kind of communication protocols such as AS2, SFTP, etc. to the usage of different types of B2B standards such as ASC X12 or UN/EDIFACT or APIs. TPM helps you  effectively manage B2B relationships with multiple trading partners. The easy-to-use user interface helps you cope with the complexity of B2B communication between trading partners.

Capabilities and key components of TPM

Key features of TPM

Company – The term company refers to the leading trading partner. The trading partner is usually the owner of the trading partner management system who covers the specific information and parameters that are necessary and reusable for setting up the B2B scenarios with trading partners.

Trading Partner –  is a company, organization, or a subsidiary to which the owner has a business relation and where the electronic exchange of business data is required.

Trading Partner Profile – provides reusable information about a company, organization or subsidiary, which is relevant for setting up a B2B scenario. It includes eg. information about business identifiers (eg. DUNS number) used for setting up the communication with the trading partner to identify the trading partner in the B2B message payload and the type of B2B standard used.

Trading Partner Agreement Template – defines a B2B scenario from the company’s point of view, it is a partially configured trading partner agreement which can be used as a baseline to create several agreements with multiple trading partners. A B2B scenario describes the choreography of business transactions that explains which kind of interchange should be sent to a trading partner or received from this trading partner during each business transaction activity. An interchange is a payload which will be exchanged between trading partners in a business transaction activity.

Trading Partner Agreement – is an agreement of a bilaterally agreed contract between two trading partners for a given business scenario(s) whereas one trading partner is the “Initiator” and the other trading partner is the “Reactor”. An agreement is based on a template(s. above) and covers the aspects of a selected trading partner at the trading partner’s side of a B2B scenario such as the B2B standard, identifiers used in the business interchanges. It furthermore links to the individually defined Message Implementation Guidelines covering the customized interfaces and the individual Mapping Guidelines covering the mappings between these customized interfaces. These guidelines are provided by the Integration Advisor.

In our following blogs we will go into more details based on an example about the concrete steps and activities of a business expert how to onboard and create and manage a B2B scenario.

Once an agreement is created and activated the underlying generic integration flow at runtime will dynamically consume the configurations stored in the Partner Directory(s. also Fig. “Components of B2B capabilities” above). Remember, there could be several business transactions per agreement and you can have many trading partners with which you will have agreements. If you go for the current Integration Suite solution, you have to create per business transaction and trading partner at least one Integration Flow. You have to think about it, what does this mean from point of view of maintenance reasons. The new approach handles all these business transaction via one generic flow using the Partner Directory. The next chapter describes this generic flow in more detail, its behavior and how to get it running in your tenant.

How do the TPM related integration content gets deployed in the runtime?

At runtime, you will need to consume all those parameters to execute end-to-end scenarios from or to your business partners. In the following chapter you will see how to use the standard content delivered by SAP to execute your scenarios end-to-end in Cloud Integration.

Integration Content Package for TPM in SAP API Business Hub

For that we deliver you an integration package in the SAP API Business Hub. You can find it in the discover section of Cloud Integration. 

Once you copy it to your workspace, you will see the 5 integration flows and the script collection that make up the package. The integration flows are divided in 3 steps.

Overview of TPM content package

The Step 1 (3 integration flows) gets the messages from sending party through AS2, IDoc or SOAP adapter. With information from the incoming message, it finds an xslt mapping in the Partner Directory and extracts with it the payload from envelope and other information needed to find the corresponding Trading Partner Agreement in Trading Partner Management. 

The Step 2 uses the information extracted in Step 1 to find the applicable Trading Partner Agreement. With the information from the agreement the incoming message is transformed into the outgoing message and delivered to Step 3. 

The Step 3 takes the final message and delivers it to the receiver party through AS2, IDoc or SOAP adapter using the communication parameters extracted from the agreement in Step 2. 

Overview of the generic integration flow

The integration flows also uses the information maintained in the Trading Partner Agreement for other purposes if required: 

• decrypt/verify incoming messages 
• generate and send functional acknowledgements 
• split bulk messages in individual messages 
• validate incoming or outgoing messages  
• generate the document number for the final message 

B2B Monitoring

The Business to Business (B2B) Monitoring view allows you to check the processing status of your B2B interchanges. An interchange is the incoming payload for B2B transactions. To start monitoring the results of the end-2-end process, you need to configure and deploy the integration flows as explained in the document “Trading Partner Management-Setting up generic integration flow” contained in the package. 

Guided Document for integration flow configuration and deployment

Once configured and deploy you can start sending messages to your Cloud Integration tenant. The concrete endpoints for sending AS2, IDoc or SOAP can be checked in Manage Integration Content of Cloud Integration. 

You or your business partners will use those endpoints to send messages. For testing purposes, you can use your preferred client, like Postman or Mendelson. The message will then appear in the B2B Monitor. There you will see the following areas: 

• Red: filter  
• Green: list of business documents 
• Orange: status of business document 
• Black: sender, receiver and agreement information 
• Blue: events with link to the Message Processing Logs 

B2B Monitoring View

Summary

SAP Integration Suite offers you with the latest release an accelerated and optimized approach to:

• onboard and manage your trading partners
• design your bilaterally agreed business scenarios
• operate & monitor your integration processes

whereas the focus area within TPM and the interconnected capabilities such as Integration Advisor for accelerated interface design and mapping is on Business-to-Business relevant content.

In trust we waked up your interest to try out our new offering you may start already with the Trial version or even consume this directly within your productive landscape. The guided steps described in our online guide.

To get a detailed overview of the Service plans, upgrade paths and regions availability of Trading Partner Management is described within the SAP Note 2903776

Within the next following blog we will guide you through how a concrete scenario should be configured and maintained so that you get the key assets and benefits of our offering.