What is an ERP Firewall?

AMR Research recently released a study on ERP Integration and found that, on average, 2.9% of transactions from external trading partners required exception processing or error handling. The same study also found that on average 34% of data feeding an ERP system comes from outside the enterprise. That’s a whole load of bad data that could potentially be entering your SAP system. The question has to be why ERP systems aren’t designed to capture these types of data quality error.

In fact, SAP does provide business logic and data integrity checks within its modules. However, when the data flows from a B2B transaction there is very little data checking.  So, there needs to be buffer between your SAP system and the data you receive from external sources. This is the facility provided by an ERP Firewall.

An ERP Firewall can be defined as an application that permits, denies or automatically corrects electronic data as it flows, in both directions, between your SAP system and the business applications of your trading partners. It ensures that bad data from external business partners doesn’t enter your SAP system or be allowed to affect downstream business applications.

One way to ensure that you have this ERP firewall is with a service like GXS Managed Services, which effectively protects your ERP environment with an ERP Firewall, and is based on over 150 of the most common SAP supply chain business rules. It is formed around a business rules engine that interrogates every piece of data entering your SAP system.

There are four typical actions that the ERP Firewall can take on encountering bad data:

• Fatal error-  The electronic document is beyond repair so the ERP Firewall rejects the document and sends a failure notification to the originator.
• Error-  The electronic document has an error that will fail upon processing so the ERP Firewall quarantines the document in an exemption queue for the originator to review and repair.
• Warning-  The electronic document has a minor error that will not disrupt processing but should be corrected in the future. The ERP Firewall passes the document through to the SAP system but logs the data quality issue in a report.
• Auto Fix- The electronic document has an error that the firewall can rectify. The ERP Firewall takes the appropriate action to auto-correct the error, such as adding or augmenting database fields, data filtering and document routing.

The power of any ERP Firewall lies in its auto-fix capabilities. By correcting minor errors the business transaction is not interrupted and you can continue to trade effectively with your business partners. By placing the ERP Firewall in a B2B Cloud  you can continually add and strengthen business rules without having to make any changes to your SAP implementations or altering any of your trading partner relationships.

Facilitating Successful SAP Implementations

GXS has over 20 years experience in working across many SAP related B2B integration projects, both single and multiple instance to support a company’s  business operations globally.  Multi-national companies in many industries including High Tech, Automotive, Retail, Consumer Goods, Manufacturing and Financial Services use GXS Managed Services to maximise their SAP investments. GXS provides a Cloud-based B2B service to these different industries that integrates with a variety of SAP modules, including Supply Chain Management and Supplier Relationship Management.

GXS Managed Services helps companies to improve the management of their SAP/B2B integration projects in a number of different ways:

Implementing Document Maps: Document mapping is one of the most complex tasks to undertake during an SAP to B2B integration project. Mapping experts must understand the relationships between data structures used by external trading partners and the information needed in SAP. For example, a mapping expert may need to extract shipping information from an advanced ship notice to populate the appropriate SHPMNT01 IDOC document.

With the possibility of having to create hundreds of maps, ensuring that maps can be created on schedule is one of the most important aspects of an integration project. Delegating the mapping process to a third party vendor reduces cost and time and frees up  your internal IT resources for other projects.  Any B2B Managed Services provider must enable you to integrate B2B messaging across multiple instances of SAP and with trading partners around the world. For example, some of the more common IDOCs that GXS has put into production are:

All B2B formats and protocols must be supported: EDI standards such as EDIFACT, ANSI.X12 and Tradacoms; XML-based standards include SWIFT, RosettaNet, CIDX and PIDX; as well as the ability to map file formats to and from any 3rd party vendor application or proprietary file format.

Status Reporting: Your B2B Managed Service should provide complete business process visibility and exception-based monitoring for both you and your customers. Visibility can be delivered through a simple web based interface, such as GXS Trading Grid Online, that provides tools such as related document queries, role based views and proactive monitoring/alerting capabilities. For example, upon completion of the translation process, GXS Managed Services will automatically generate a STATUS IDOC (Status = 5 or 6) back to the client’s SAP environment to indicate whether the IDOC translation failed or succeeded. Exceptions are indicated in the web-based interface and trigger an automated email alert to you and the GXS Managed Services Production Control team.

Managing Data Quality: A major challenge for all SAP systems is to ensure that it only receives clean data from external sources. B2B Managed Services should be created around a set of robust business rules that ensure data is accurate before entering back office systems, which eliminates the need for investigating data mismatches, reprocessing inaccurate data, or calling trading partners to resolve data quality issues. For example, GXS utilises a robust business rules engine based on 150 of the most common supply chain-related SAP business rules.  This pre-processing of externally sourced information before it enters an SAP system effectively places an ERP Firewall around your SAP applications.

SAP Connectivity: B2B integration platforms must be connected to the numerous different instances of SAP running at local manufacturing plants, retail stores, shared service centres and headquarters locations. Any B2B Managed Service must support a broad range of communications protocols  to connect with SAP including ALE, AS2, PI and FTP. Although AS2 and FTP-based communications and connections via web services and HTTPs must be accommodated so external trading partners are able to send SAP-related information via a secure internet-based connection.

High Availability: Ensuring that your external connections to trading partners are highly available is critical to the smooth running of your integrated SAP/B2B environment. If external connectivity is lost for any reason then this will interrupt the flow of information going into your SAP environment and any downstream business systems. Your B2B Managed Service provider should be able to deliver over 99.95% availability where both infrastructure and data are replicated for full redundancy and fail-over. 

Managing Trading Partner Communities – Most SAP upgrades are not purely technical in nature.  Functionality upgrades are usually the justification for investment. With new modules or expanded user-communities comes the need to connect to a broader range of supply chain partners. With larger companies having globalised their operations, the on-boarding and integration of trading partners across different time zones can be difficult to manage. In many cases, companies simply do not have the resources to manage the on-boarding of trading partners in different geographical regions.

GXS Managed Services provides a comprehensive on-boarding service to both recruit and enable your trading partners. GXS offers a range of options for trading partners to connect to our Managed Services platform including web forms, Microsoft Excel adapters, VAN interconnects and ERP adapters.

Program Management – SAP projects require an immense amount of co-ordination across the extended enterprise. B2B integration managers must ensure that maps are created correctly, trading partners are connected properly and data validation rules are reflected within the B2B system as well. If companies are looking to introduce further SAP functionality, for example implementing a transport management system, then the project management challenge becomes even further complex.

GXS Managed Services allows a company to leverage highly-experienced project managers to manage the implementation process. GXS will provide a dedicated program manager who will undertake a number of roles to ensure that SAP to B2B integration projects go as smoothly as possible. Their role will include looking after the day to day communication with a community of trading partners and ensuring that trading partners can support new transaction types, data quality rules or KPIs to measure performance. Finally, they also offer support for testing and looking after the overall release and deployment of the newly integrated platform with the customer.

Providing Global Support – Many companies have globalised their operations and have manufacturing plants and trading partners around the world. As a result, all users of an SAP/B2B integration platform must have access to a global support infrastructure so that if any problems arise they can be resolved as quickly as possible.

GXS Managed Services provides 24/7, multi-lingual support coverage. This helps users across the extended enterprise to receive the help they need, in their language and time zone around the world. With many companies establishing manufacturing operations in low cost countries such as China, India, Eastern Europe and Latin America, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to support trading partners within these regions of the world.

Why Use GXS Managed Services?

• Over 20 years experience of B2B/SAP integration projects
• SAP single, multiple and consolidated instance projects
• High tech, automotive, retail, manufacturing, consumer goods industry experience
• Extensive experience mapping into and out of SAP IDOCs
• Cloud-based B2B infrastructure
• Seamless integration with all major SAP modules and communications protocols
• Mapping Centre of Excellence, with 175 mapping experts supporting over 200 document types
• Simple web-based administration through GXS Trading Grid Online
• Dedicated B2B integration project managers
• Up to 99.95% system availability
• 24/7, multi-lingual, local market support
• Fully Certified for SAP NetWeaver

Why use B2B Managed Services?

B2B Managed Services, also called B2B Outsourcing, can be defined as outsourcing the provision of your B2B infrastructure to a third party provider, such as GXS. With the increasing cost and complexity of simply maintaining B2B systems internally, over 60% of companies already outsource some part of their B2B infrastructure according to research from Yankee Group. 

When integrating B2B requirements with your SAP systems, B2B Managed Services delivers a wide range of benefits:

Ensure Data Quality:  With AMR Research proving that almost every SAP system has accepted bad data from external sources, it is clear that the best solution is to clean the data prior to it entering your SAP implementation – so the data has no opportunity to infect other business systems. B2B Managed Services allows you to create an ERP Firewall  around your SAP system. Based on established SAP business rules, this simple approach is a major move to eliminating unclean data and, as your Managed Services provider will be constantly refining the firewall, the solution becomes more effective over time.

Forget B2B Complexity:  How easily can you integrate current B2B standards, technologies and communications protocols into your internal systems? Then factor in the knowledge that these standards, technologies and protocols are changing and evolving constantly. Now, consider an increasingly global marketplace that is still driven by local trading standards and regulations. How easy is it to enter a new geographical market or trade with new suppliers in Eastern Europe or the Far East? B2B Managed Services shields you completely from this level of complexity. All you need to be confident about is that your Managed Services provider has fully invested to seamlessly support all the standards, technologies and protocols to enable you to begin trading in whichever geographical locations you wish almost immediately.

Accelerate Trading Partner Onboarding:  Many organisations report that trading partner on-boarding can add significant delay to meeting their business objectives. B2B Managed Services mean that you can on-board trading quickly and effectively as you are both plugging into a common B2B infrastructure where technology, regulatory and performance issues have already been overcome. You can begin to create a secure ‘plug and play’ trading community.

Increase Business Agility:  Responding to changes within your trading community will be key to driving value in your business. However, you can’t afford to continually upgrade your B2B infrastructure or rewrite elements of your SAP systems to accommodate them. B2B Managed Services are often delivered via a B2B Cloud  that uses a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to produce a component-based approach to delivering B2B services. The result is that individual components can be quickly updated to absorb all changes without affecting the performance or operations of the provider’s B2B infrastructure and – as importantly – completely outside your SAP implementation and without any intervention from you.

On-demand and Scalable:  One of the great advantages of B2B Managed Services is that you are not charged for capacity that you are not using and you have the ability to scale up and down seamlessly as business demand dictates. Most B2B outsourcing contracts are charged on a transactional basis. Sometimes you will be able to pay an initial subscription fee that allows you to reduce the downstream ‘per transaction’ fees. The cost benefits of B2B Managed Services become apparent. You can eliminate the need for initial B2B infrastructure development as well as the need to pay for and support capacity that you don’t require. 

Program Management and Support:  SAP to B2B integration requires an immense amount of coordination across your extended enterprise. If you use your program to extend the functionality of your SAP systems then this must be carefully managed so that the correct changes are introduced into your B2B solutions. But, implementation is only the beginning. Change management and global support begin to be important factors as soon as the initial system is delivered. B2B Managed Services can provide a flexible and scalable B2B resource so as your project grows your resource can grow accordingly. However, this requires a large-scale B2B Managed Service provider as you should expect the provider to understand the legal and regulatory landscape for any give region or nation as well as delivering local language support.

If you would like to learn more about B2B Managed Services and how it can help your company then please visit our dedicated microsite: www.b2boutsourcing.co.uk