Five Benefits of SAP Cloud Platform Integration Advisor

Business documents, like purchase orders, invoices, and remittances, are exchanged with numerous trading partners. Each trading partner may have differing expectations and requirements of the format and standard of the business documents. Traditionally, IT departments and EDI teams worked to create mappings for the business documents to fulfill the requirements of the trading partners. This often created a cumbersome and expensive integration process that was very difficult to manage and nearly impossible to scale.

The Integration Advisor capability of the SAP Integration Suite provides a no-code solution to integrate trading partners. SAP Integration Advisor allows organizations to describe message elements, mappings, and rules. Integration Advisor also provides libraries to aid the description of message elements and rules. This SAP Cloud Platform Integration Advisor tool provides a no-code integration solution to create integration flows that can be consumed by SAP and non-SAP applications. In this post, we will provide an overview of Integration Advisor and provide five specific benefits of the solution for enterprise integration and B2B integration initiatives.

Two main concepts of Integration Advisor are Message Implementation Guidelines (MIGs) and Mapping Guidelines (MAGs). Integration Advisor uses these to provide a rules-based framework for integrating messages. Using Integration Advisor, interface design work is simplified, and XSLT and/or Java mapping codes are not necessary. In place of these, Integration Advisor provides an easy to use, spreadsheet-like tool for field mapping and transformation. Most importantly, Integration Advisor allows non-technical personnel to perform EDI mapping and message integration work.

SAP Integration Advisor is part of SAP's Integration Suite. Thus, it is cloud-based and contains advanced features that simplify the integration work of end users. SAP offers continuous enhancements of the Integration Suite, and the shared content created by SAP and the Integration Suite users. With Integration Advisor, organizations get a tool that provides mapping and integration services to SAP's Cloud Platform Integration (SAP CPI), and other SAP Integration Services.

Importance of Integration Advisor in the SAP Integration Suite

Understanding the scope of Integration Advisor requires understanding the scope of SAP Integration Suite. Integration Suite is SAP's end-to-end integration offering, and consolidates multiple SAP integration and APIs products, including SAP CPI, SAP Cloud API Management, and SAP Open Connectors. Further, it consolidates SAP Integration Advisor for design time integration with B2B and EDI integration services.

Within SAP Integration Suite, Integration Advisor focuses on design time integration and governance, while CPI focuses on run time integration and execution. Design time integration governance involves defining and validating integrations, publishing, and making integrations available to run time integration artifacts. An example of design time integration with CPI is to define and validate MIGs and/or MAGs for integrating X12 850 Purchase Order messages. These definitions and validations are published, and integrated CPI run time artifacts are used to capture, transform, and route the integration messages.

Other integration offerings in the market have less integrated design and run time integration components. In several integration offerings, design time integration components and run time integration components are implemented by different vendors, and often result in significant gaps and the need for customization. With the Integration Suite, SAP has integrated design time and run time integration artifacts.

B2B and EDI integration project influence factors and complexity are different from other types of integration projects. With other types of application integration projects, the organization has control over both ends of the integration, and can consequently force the other end of the integration to use a particular format. With B2B integration, the organization can not dictate terms to its business partners and can not control the format in which the business partners send or receive messages.

Although Integration Advisor promotes the use of standards, in reality, very few, if any, of the partners use standards in their purest form. With Integration Advisor, an organization works with its trading partners to define a standard message type, and from that message type defines variations for other partners. Using this approach, an organization can reuse mapping and integration logic, and achieve significant time and cost savings.

Benefit 1 - Simplified B2B/EDI Mapping

The process of creating and maintaining integration mappings is almost always identified as the biggest challenge by integration users. With traditional tools, developers must understand both the source and target message formats in order to perform the required translation. In some cases, developers may need to use a scripting or programming language to create the message integration.

With Integration Advisor, message integrations can be done using a graphical interface. Integrations can be created by using functions to transform source message elements into the required format for the target message. Integration Advisor includes a variety of functions to perform transformations such as splitting, concatenating, or evaluating target message elements conditionally.

Message Implementation Guidelines (MIGs)

Message Implementation Guidelines (MIGs) are the foundation of Integration Advisor. MIGs provide specific guidelines to integration users on the EDI or XML elements that the organization expects to receive or send. MIGs are developed based on accepted industry standards. Most standards are flexible and allow for elements to be optional.

There are significant impacts of a MIG on design and implementation of integrations. In its absence, different integration designers make different assumptions while creating integration. It leads to differences in integrations with regards to mandatory field, valid codes, and segment repeats. Defining a field in a MIG makes integration designers align their integrations with the definition. In an organization, the field definition may change based on business requirement, for example due to a change in regulation a field may become mandatory and it should be defined as mandatory in the MIG and the change cascades to all the integrations in the organization. Without a centralized definition in MIG, change management for integration may become a big challenge in an organization.

Faster creation of Mapping Guideline Artifacts (MAGs)

When a MIG is documented, field to field transformation is well defined and the integration designers do not need to define field transformation from scratch. Thus integration designers may save considerable time which they usually spend in defining field to field transformation from a business requirements document.

Decreased burden of low level coding

Since the mapping is done using configuration in a user interface, integration designers do not need to write code for integrations. This is in contrast to traditional integrations where integrators write hundreds or thousands of lines of code for integrating two systems. The code is generally written for defining system transformations, validating system data, and processing edge conditions.

Reusable Mapping Templates

Integration Advisor enables teams to save time by saving mappings and reusing them as templates. For instance, if a team has developed a mapping to convert EDIFACT ORDERS to their company's SAP IDoc format, they can use this mapping template to develop mappings for other conversion requests involving the same base standard.

Community Content Library Access

SAP provides access to a community content library that provides industry standard MIGs and MAGs. Standard EDI messages described in this content library covers various industry verticals (i.e. automotive, retail) and helps teams avoid interpreting message definitions from first principles, which can be a time consuming and tedious task.

How Shared Templates Avoid Duplication

On a large enterprise scale, a centralized mapping template repository reduces the risk of a number of mappings being developed in parallel, often by different business units, to perform the same conversion. It is inevitable that mappings developed for the same conversion will change over time, and this can lead to various errors and bugs. By design, a shared repository eliminates the risk of various mappings developed in isolation.

Integration Advisor greatly reduces the time required for mapping integrations and significantly shortens the time to connect with new trading partners. For companies that regularly complete new partner connections, such as companies in the retail, manufacturing and distribution industries, the advantages provided by Integration Advisor creates a competitive edge.

Benefit 2 - Faster Time to Value

Integration Advisor provides out-of-the-box mapping for the most common EDI message types and variations. Rather than spending valuable time reading and interpreting EDI specs, as is commonly done during the early phases of an integration project, that work has already been completed and provided in an easy to use format.

Integration Advisor further reduces the time required for development by providing reusable codes and templates, as well as, a configuration based, as opposed to a coding based, integration tool. Intuitive mapping tools provide integration teams with automated field-to-field mappings for one to one integrations.

Minimized Testing Overhead

Because mappings are built using standardized components (i.e. templates and MIGs) rather than custom code, the volume of code requiring validation is significantly reduced. As a result, project teams are able to test partner-specific or custom components, whereas standard components need not be revalidated. Because the code has already been tested and proven by other implementation teams, retesting is not necessary and significantly reduces project testing time.

Benefit 3 - Improved Collaboration across Teams

Integrating different systems within a company can be challenging due to the inability of different business units to come to a consensus on the meaning of the data being integrated. The Integration Advisor creates a bridge between business and IT by allowing mappings to be defined using a language that requires no or very little technical skills, thereby promoting collaboration and increasing productivity.

Extended User Access

Because code is presented in a format similar to a spreadsheet, business users and partners are able to review mappings and determine if a field in the system is actually mapped to the field as required by the business.

Versioning of Integration Content

MIGs and MAGs are versioned. Therefore, changes to integrations are tracked and rolling back problematic changes to integrations is possible.

Changes and Audit Trails

Tracking changes to mappings is essential. Our tool automatically provides a change log showing who made what change to a mapping and when. Often, the individual making the change will include a description explaining the reason for the change. This change log proves to be very useful when determining the reason for an unexpected behavior by a mapping. It is also extremely useful during regulatory compliance or governance reviews.

Controls for Governance

From an access control perspective, we provide the ability to administer different levels of control over MIGs and MAGs. This means that for example, only a select few, possibly Integrations Senior Architects, can approve modifications to a foundational MIG. Other Analysts can be granted read or comment access to the foundational MIG to review it.

Benefit 4 - Optimization of Standardization and Regulatory Compliance

Standardization is essential for enterprises operating in regulated industries or enterprises that have large partner networks for a number of reasons including compliance and risk management.

Support for Various Industry Standards (EDIFACT, X12, etc.)

Integration Advisor helps enterprises by providing pre-built integration modules for various EDI standards. As a result, enterprises are less likely to create custom, undocumented integration modules.

Standardized Governance for Integration Projects

To integrate various partners, many enterprises develop custom integration solutions. Because of this, natural fragmentation occurs within an enterprise. By standardizing the integration solutions, enterprises can ensure that each of the partner integrations is developed in accordance with the standards of the enterprise.

Version Control for Policies and Procedures

More covered industries include: Healthcare, Financial Services, and the Automotive Industry.

A centralized and version-controlled set of integration artifacts helps enterprises to easily respond to requests for information (RFI) and help enterprises to be audit-ready. Because the artifacts are centrally stored, enterprises can have full control and access to all integration artifacts.

Benefit 5: Tight Integration with SAP Cloud Integration (CPI)

Integration Advisor is powerful because of its integration with SAP Cloud Integration (CPI). CPI is the runtime engine that helps in execution of integration flows.

Integration Flows can be enriched with Design-time artifacts

The design time artifacts captured by Integration Advisor are published in CPI as mapping steps. This enables seamless integration of design artifacts with the runtime integration.

Unified platform experience

SAP Integration Suite helps customers integrate design time and runtime tools with a unified experience. Customers can design integrations in a unified design tool, deploy the integrations, and monitor the integrations with unified runtime tools.

CPI integration Flows and Integration Advisor

Once a Mapping Advice Generation (MAG) document is created, customers can use it in CPI integration flows. A CPI integration flow can access MAG documents that are published in the repository. This gives flexibility to customers to document their integrations and leverage those documents for runtime integrations.

Unified monitoring and maintenance

Because all aspects of integration, from definition to design to implementation, happen within a single platform, when issues occur during implementation and execution, teams can quickly identify the root cause within the definition, if needed. This is considerably more efficient than relying on disparate tools to connect the dots. As a result, mean time to resolution is drastically reduced.

The Top 5 Advantages of the SAP Integration Advisor

These positive effects of the Integration Advisor give companies in business-to-business (B2B) integrations, especially those with frequent changes in trading partners, different and sometimes contradicting business units, and companies in strict and regulated markets, the opportunity to gain a better and faster integration with their business partners.

The SAP Integration Advisor provides a number of advantages, including simplified definition and design of integration processes and integration tasks, and automated integration of cloud platform integration (CPI) components. As a result, enterprise integration and B2B integration projects can be more quickly, effectively and less costly implemented.