B2B and SAP: An Essential Partnership

How many of your business processes are truly internal-only processes? Today, almost everything your company does involves exchanging information with customers, suppliers, resellers, distributors and banks.  AMR Research has discovered that over one third of data in your SAP systems comes from an external source. The success of your SAP implementation will therefore depend on the strength of its B2B integration. There are key reasons to focus on B2B, such as:

Your Bottom Line: We all know how costly it is to manually correct inaccurate data within your business systems. But, that is only a small percentage of the real cost that you could be facing if your SAP and B2B systems are not properly integrated. AMR Research found that over half the companies they surveyed said they had lost B2B connectivity at some point. Hardly surprising, as 65% of them admitted inadequate B2B testing prior to a new ERP launch and nearly one third had to prematurely terminate B2B testing programmes with external trading partners. Estimates put the potential cost of these B2B planning and implementation delays to be in excess of £34,000 a day or over £750,000 per year for large organisations.

Data Quality: With the high volumes of external data entering your SAP systems, there is a good chance that the information will not be accurate enough to be processed correctly and will therefore be used in error by other business systems. Leaving aside the cost of manually correcting data, the impact on downstream activities is of concern, especially when AMR Research’s study shows an error rate of almost 3% for B2B data in the ERP systems of manufacturing companies. A simple mismatch of part numbers can easily lead to inaccurate order fulfillment and delayed payment or cancellation.

Business Agility:  Both demand and supply driven organisations need the capacity and flexibility to respond rapidly to market conditions. This requires visibility across your entire trading community to enable you to make near real time business decisions and the highest levels of system availability to ensure that transactions from external business partners get through to the SAP system without delay or interruption. The role of your B2B infrastructure is to do more than just provide constant communication with your trading community, it also needs to provide an ERP Firewall  that protects your SAP system from inaccurate or unclean data from entering the system.

Choose a B2B Managed Services Provider with SAP in it’s DNA
If you consider working with a B2B Managed Services provider, you should ask them the following questions:

• Do you support the SAP ALE and PI communication protocols?
• Have you got in-depth experience of mapping into and out of SAP IDOCS?
• Do you have a business rules engine – based on SAP’s supply chain-related business rules – to ensure the accuracy of data entering your ERP system?
• Do you provide seamless integration with the most common SAP modules including Supply Chain Management, Supplier Relationship Management, Financials and Business Intelligence?
• Is your solution certified for SAP NetWeaver?
• Can your solution provide high performance, high availability integration across multiple SAP instances and your trading community regardless of technical capabilities or compliance requirements?