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Foreword
This year’s TechEd has shown that SAP continues to hit pedal to the metal with integrations offering. APIM, EM, ML, CPI, EIM SDI, DI, Open Connectors and others we use to satisfy business needs. Sometimes it may be a bit overwhelming to navigate in the matrix of new acronyms, services and solutions.
At Int4 we come across many exciting integration projects. With this blog series we would like to share our insights into the state-of-the-art solutions we deliver to our customers. In the same time I hope that we help you navigate in the fairly new world of SAP integration infused with constantly growing BTP services offering.
Introduction
Optimal process with efficient and fast decision loop is essential in modern business. Imagine you get an instant insight into crucial events and data in real time. Whenever a new document or request you are interested in arrives, you get a notification on your communicator. You can also access the data and investigate with a mobile or web app. In this blog series we will describe the above scenario based on sales orders generated in S/4HANA system. We will show you how people in your organization (or your partners) can get notified instantly about new important document in the system and how to expose this data in a safe and user-friendly way.
Overview
Whenever a new document is created a notification is sent to an Event Mesh instance (Note: In our case it’s going to be a sales order document but note that it can be anything of your interest. It doesn’t even have to be S/4HANA system acting as an emitter. The process shown here is universal and document type agnostic). Event Mesh distributes the received event to a CPI flow which collects more data from the sender system via OData. Event received contains only the unique key of the document therefore more details need to be collected. This way you can control and extract only the data you need.
Next, sales order is saved in HANA Cloud instance via SAP Cloud Application Programming model app and exposed to the outer world via API Management.
In the meantime when the sales order is successfully saved a new event is generated and sent to the Event Mesh. EM distributes it later to CPI, which sends the event to Open Connectors Slack instance. As a result a new notification appears in a given Slack channel. Slack is used only as an example here, notification can be sent to many other services/systems or messengers. The full list can be found here: https://help.openconnectors.ext.hana.ondemand.com/home/catalog and even if you can’t find the service of your interest, you can develop a connector on your own.
Figure 1.1: Architecture overview of the solution
Benefits
Why would you want to implement the solution drafted above?
- Realtime data exposure to the outer world. Instead of sales orders you could expose current stock to your vendors and notify them when it’s running below a certain level.
- Data is exposed in a safe way thanks to API Management. Details and more APIM use cases you can find in the next parts of this blog series.
- Instant notification which shortens the reaction time and makes processes more efficient.
- Scalability thanks to Event Mesh implementation. More about this part of the solution can be found in the next parts of this blog series.
What’s next?
In the next parts of this blog series we’ll explain in detail every part of the solution so you can get a deeper insight and understanding. See you there!
Read also:
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2. Discover approval level in MM Flexible Workflow agent determination BAdI
