Welcome, fellow integrators, to the seventh installment of this blog post series, where I talk to SAP Cloud Integration practitioners, developers, architects and enthusiasts about their favourite feature of our favourite platform. This time around, I get to interview a true SAP integration veteran who has been a part of this community since the very beginning: Bhavesh Kantilal.
Welcome to the series, Bhavesh! Could you introduce yourself briefly, please?
My name is Bhavesh Kantilal. I am an independent freelance consultant based in Stockholm, Sweden, and I have been working with SAP integration technologies since SAP XI 3.0 and with SAP Cloud Integration from when it was called HCI 🙂
Thank you very much! And now the central question of this blog post series: What’s your favourite SAP Cloud Integration feature?
There are many features of SAP Cloud Integration I admire, but my current favourite is Trading Partner Management coupled with B2B monitoring. This feature has captivated me so much that I have dedicated a whole blog post series (comprising 18 posts so far) to it on my personal blog.
Why that feature in particular?
In the evolving landscape of cloud integration, where SaaS applications are becoming more prevalent, classic EDI and B2B transactions continue to coexist and flourish within major customer enterprises.
Consider a customer landscape involving integration with thousands of suppliers. This is typical in sectors like manufacturing, retail, and automotive, where integration occurs with numerous suppliers across various EDI standards like EDIFACT and ANSIX12. These integrations might be point-to-point via protocols like AS2 or through other EDI gateways and VAN mailboxes. In these B2B transactions, each trading partner maintains its own unique set of parameters, identifiers, and transformations. Often, the mapping and transformation are consistent, but what varies is the trading partner connectivity and control records or identifiers.
Trading Partner Management (TPM) in SAP Cloud Integration offers a comprehensive solution from SAP, where most parameters varying across partners are configurable in TPM. Your main focus then shifts to building mappings via MAGs or classical message mappings, while TPM handles the complexities of EDI transformations, partner connectivity, and adapter configurations.
TPM extensively utilizes the Partner Directory in SAP Cloud Integration yet simplifies this with a user-friendly UI. Along with the standard iflows provided by SAP, TPM facilitates a plug-and-play B2B architecture that, despite initial complexity, becomes straightforward with experience.
Moreover, TPM enables out-of-the-box B2B monitoring. If you're familiar with SAP PO, the B2B monitoring in TPM resembles SAP PO monitoring, allowing you to view your B2B payloads and navigate from B2B monitoring to your SAP message logs. You get 90 days of payload logging with TPM (unlike the usual 30 days on MPLs).
How do you see the future of Trading Partner Management?
One area for growth in TPM is out-of-the-box monitoring and alerting for failed B2B transactions, which is currently missing but is on the road map. If I were to predict the future, I'd expect SAP to soon release this as a pre-delivered feature, integrated either with Cloud ALM or the Alert Notification Service in BTP.
There are currently limitations in EDI and IDoc bundling, but I am confident that these will be addressed in upcoming releases. Similarly, EDI Functional Acknowledgments are presently supported only for AS2 adapters, and while workarounds exist (like using the ProcessDirect adapter), this feature is likely to be further enhanced by SAP.
Another missing feature is archival of your B2B messages to external services like the Document Management Service in BTP. This is a road map item from SAP and this is something that multiple customers need, considering that B2B transactions are legal documents and having a technical log and archive of these messages is mandatory for compliance reasons.
As customers transition their B2B migrations from SAP PO to SAP Cloud Integration, I foresee a scenario where SAP PO message mappings will be utilized in SAP Cloud Integration and integrated via TPM. This is a feature that will increasingly be adopted, particularly by customers who have been using SAP PO as their B2B gateway.
I explore alternative solutions to these challenges in my TPM blog series here.
Thanks a lot for sharing your insights, Bhavesh! It was great to catch up.
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