Effective B2B and SAP Integration

There are a number of factors that should be taken into consideration when integrating B2B and SAP systems. A service provider solution, such as GXS Managed Services, greatly simplifies this integration with your trading partner community as you only need to be concerned with the integration between your SAP system and the service provider. However, there are still a number of integration options that need to be considered:-

Integrating Using SAP Application Link Enabling (ALE)

SAP ALE can provide very tight integration between GXS and your SAP system.  With GXS’ SAP certified ALE adapter, you will establish a secure socket layer connection to GXS Managed Services.  GXS then performs a Remote Function Call (RFC) to exchange IDOCS with your SAP system.

Integrating Using SAP PI or Other B2B Connectivity

Many companies use SAP’s PI integration broker to integrate multiple SAP systems and to integrate SAP to other back-end applications.  If you already have SAP PI in place, you can use it to connect to GXS Managed Services.  One option is to leverage an ALE connection from SAP PI to GXS.  This will provide you with the benefits of tight ALE integration, but instead of connecting to a single SAP implementation the connection would be through your PI integration broker.

SAP PI also supports add-ons for a number of connectors for B2B protocols such as AS2 and SFTP.  If you have existing B2B integration capabilities, whether through SAP PI or some other integration broker software, you can connect into the GXS Managed Services environment using any of these standard B2B protocols.