PEPPOL Integration with SAP Business Network

Disclaimer: Ariba Network is now known as SAP Business Network.

SAP Business Network now enables Customers to receive invoices that are submitted by their Suppliers via PEPPOL e-Delivery network. Currently, this functionality is enabled for countries like Australia, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, and New Zealand. SAP Business Network uses the SAP DRC (Document and Reporting Compliance) as the Access Point to receive the invoices from the PEPPOL Network.

As pre-requisites,

• The Customer needs to have an account in SAP Business Network
• The Customer needs to ensure that they have purchased a PEPPOL Exchange Service subscription for the SAP Document and Reporting Compliance Cloud Edition.

Figure 1: DRC PEPPOL Integration with SAP Business Network

Once the customer has signed up for the DRC PEPPOL Service and has gained access, the customer can go to the DRC PEPPOL dashboard to set up users and their roles for the service. This dashboard enables the customer to keep track of the configurations needed to connect to the source system, and maintain the PEPPOL Identifier Type and Identifier value that will identify the invoice recipient.

Connection Establishment

To establish the connection to SAP Business Network from DRC PEPPOL Service, navigate to the ‘Connection Management’ tab and create a new connection with the system as ‘Ariba’ in the ‘Connect to Source System’ tab in DRC PEPPOL Dashboard. The connection details are pre-populated while establishing the connection to SAP Business Network. Once a successful connection is established, the customer will be able to successfully receive the invoices in SAP Business Network from DRC PEPPOL Service.

Figure 2: Connect to Source System screen in DRC PEPPOL Dashboard

Document Type & Version Supported

The SAP Business Network supports PEPPOL Business Interoperability Specifications (BIS) Billing Universal Business Language (UBL) Invoice 3.0  document type for countries Australia, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, and New Zealand.

Participant Registration in DRC PEPPOL Dashboard

The customer is required to register the company into DRC PEPPOL Service using a unique identifier (Participant ID) which will be maintained in the Master Data Management tab of the DRC PEPPOL Dashboard. The customer then needs to activate the participant ID to receive the invoices by selecting the activate/deactivate icon under the Actions. Once, it is activated the Peppol Network Status will be changed to ‘Send and Receive Enabled’.

Note: By deactivating the participant ID, the customer will stop receiving the invoices from the DRC PEPPOL Service.

Figure 3: Master Data Management screen in DRC PEPPOL Dashboard

Participant ID Registration on SAP Business Network 

The customer should register the same Participant ID as maintained in the DRC PEPPOL Dashboard in their SAP Business Network account. The selection of the fields needs to be done as per the requirement in sequential order, for example, the ‘Scheme Type’ dropdown is dependent on the selection of the ‘Country/Region’. 

To register the participant ID, go to ‘Administration -> Configuration -> Configure External Network Identifiers’.

In SAP Business Network, the PEPPOL Participant ID is referred to as Network Identifier. The customer needs to maintain the PEPPOL Participant ID against the ‘Network Identifier’ column as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: PEPPOL Participant ID Registration screen in Ariba Buyer account

Submission of the Invoice

The Supplier will submit a ‘UBL’ Invoice from their billing system to the PEPPOL Network using the Access Point they have registered. The Supplier Access Point will then communicate with the PEPPOL network to identify the receiver in the PEPPOL Network. Upon receiving the UBL document, the PEPPOL Sender Access Point will perform the required checks on the document. If the invoice document has no errors, it gets routed to the PEPPOL Receiver Access Point. PEPPOL Receiver Access Point (in this scenario DRC PEPPOL Service) routes the document to Cloud Integration Gateway (CIG) for converting the UBL document to ‘cXML’. The converted cXML document will have the UBL XML as an attachment that gets submitted to SAP Business Network customer account.

View the Incoming UBL invoice

The customer will be able to effectively exchange electronic invoices via the DRC PEPPOL e-Delivery network to SAP Business Network. Additionally, the customer will have access to the DRC PEPPOL dashboard’s ‘Document Monitor’ to view and track the existing and new incoming UBL invoices.

The customer will be able to view the received UBL invoice by navigating to the ‘Invoices’ -> Invoices menu of their SAP Business Network account. These invoices will be marked as External XML Invoices.

Figure 5: Invoices screen in SAP Business Network

Figure 6: Attachments sent along with the Invoice

Further information on PEPPOL Integration with SAP Business Network can be found here.

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