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.