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032 – Successfactor integration with Luke Marson

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I had the pleasure of having Luke Marson as a guest in the Integration Podcast who is a solution architect at Ixerv. He is an experienced solution architect and widely-recognized expert in SuccessFactors and SAP ERP HCM. He Provides end-to-end HR and HR technology strategy, advisory, assessments, roadmaps, transformation, optimization, and implementation services for large, global enterprise customers.

Luke Marson has been around the SAP space for a decade, more than half of that is within the SAP SuccessFactors space. He has been solution architect, integration architect, a lead consultant, a project director and also different roles over the years, working with customers on SAP SuccessFactors transformations.

A proven, powerful integration platform

There are a few different options, you can look at it from a perspective of middleware technology, from API´s and then from functionality within SuccessFactors itself. So, from a middleware perspective when you subscribe to employ central, as part of the subscription customers will get a subscription for SAP Cloud platform integration, and that essentially provides you with an unlimited amount of integration connections as long as one end of the integration, either the inbound or outbound, is touching the employee central system. Now it is a proven, powerful integration platform, previously SAP had up in the atmosphere into the employee central subscription. That´s still available for customers on request, most costumes are getting the news in the SAP cloud platform integration as their middleware employee central.

There are two core foundational API´s, there is the SuccessFactor API, that’s the original SOAP-based API and now the OData V2 and V4 that are taking over. There is also the Integration Center that allows business users to perform integration and developing reports them self. There is some collaboration between the two sides.

After doing a SuccessFactors project I do understand some of the complexity of the suite and what needs to be integrated. We cover some of the pre-packaged content where a lot of the modifications is because of customization on the backend SAP systems. Here some of your customizations will cause the integration to be more difficult.

 

 

031 – SAP Open Connectors

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I  had the pleasure of having Bogdan Petrescu as a guest in the Integration Podcast. He is the director of Strategic Accounts at Cloud Elements – a fast growing API integration platform for SaaS companies and enterprises. I think we had a great talk, and it was very interesting to hear Bogdan Petrescus thoughts on what SAP Open Connectors can do.

One of the key challenges for integration strategy for SAP customers and partners are becoming connectivity to third-party applications. One gap has been the ability for those services to make the third part application easier so that users don’t have to build their own connectors.

Open Connectors is a way to fill that gap and take all the amazing integration services, that have already been delivered and continue to be innovating and basically add third part connectivity as a component directly in the product. Developers working on the platform of Cloud Elements do not have to work with other types of API or connectivity message, everything on the open connectors platform is exposed to a rest API.

170 application connectors

The Open connector platform has about 170 application connectors which are market-leading apps across marketing, sales automation, payments and more. It is possible to build new connectors to every endpoint who is offering an API.

When it comes to mapping data that’s traveling between SAP a not SAP-systems it can be quite a challenge because those applications are not requiring to maintain any kind of standard data model of course. So along with the mapping method, one of the normalization components is the ability to work with consumer data. As long as the endpoint to CPI that is used in the connector allows access to the custom data, is will be possible to translate that through API´s.

So when you are building those virtual data resources or even doing mapping and CPI which works perfectly as well, you are working with a full payload and not just a standard field of objects.

 

 

029 – SAP Integration with Adam Kiwon

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In this podcast, I have a conversation with Adam Kiwon. Adam is a part of WhitePaper InterfaceDesign. He is posting some of his products and idea at https://www.integration-excellence.com. Adam and his team have created different CPI Adapters, content, and product for making SAP PI/PO better.  

We do cover quite a bit of different areas regarding integration, it was pretty educational for me to be a part of the conversation.

  • Migration strategies when it makes sense. And we talk a little about upgrading single stack 7.31 system and migration to single stack
  • Creating CPI adapters and how they did it
  • How to create CPI content as a partner and the CPI marketplace
  • How Adam sees the need for tools to improve CPI/PI where he has different interface monitoring systems
  • Why Adam had proposed to use the Figaf Seeburger tools for migrating to the B2B Add-on on a project
  • We talked about some of the training they where working on for the CPI.

 

028 – CPI SuccessFactor and Cloud Integration Patterns

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I had a chance to meet  at #SITCPH two weeks ago. Vadim is an Integration Architect at ARM.  We got to talk a lot on integration and what was going one. I have been looking a lot on Vadim blogs on sap.com like the SAP PI adapter logging or the dark side of Groovy Scripting.

I talked with Vadim Klimov about how new tools have an influence on the way we work with cloud integration and how flows for different scenarios can help us understand the integration with SuccessFactors using SAP CPI and a prem PI. I’m currently involved in a project where we are using OData V2 to access SuccessFactors data. There are some challenges involved with it. We need some workaround to be able to see information about people starting in the future. In The Integration Center in SuccessFactors, their are many options, when you are looking for filed-based integration. The interface is web-based and allows business users to easily create files. Vadim is using the CPI and PI to move the file to their own landscape.

We also talked about how they do error handling in CPI and what makes sense in that perspective. The process works differently than in PI, so you must understand how it works best there.  At Figaf we are improving the capabilities to monitor, test and support your CPI systems, so you can get notifications about what is going on.

We also cover Groovy development, as I would like to understand Vadim thinking on the area.

It was a very interesting conversation which I hope, you will enjoy.

 

 

 

027 – The future of SAP Integration

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Tuesday, November 13. 2018, I just hosted a webinar about the key takeaways from SAP Teched and how to implement things based on it. It thinks it was one of my own webinars with most viewers (40). So it is an important topic. I think I missed the Gartner quote that 50% of the development budget will be about integration or something in that line.

When we were starting to see some cloud applications I did not see so many integrations. Lately, I have seen quite a number of a project involving some cloud application. I had seen that SAP would be able to provide some of the content as pre-delivered, but there are going to be so much more than you will need to develop. I just got an email from an SAP customer that they got a tsunami of cloud integration, so it is other areas as well.

Understand where you are going

On the webinar, I do cover how you can understand your own integrations and try to plan what integration you should be doing. I recommend that you take a look at the Integration Solution Advisor – Methodology. It has been updated and I have talked with quite a few architects using it and it gave them a good understanding of what they should be doing.

Roadmap

Then I cover the current state of the SAP PI roadmap, which will affect your existing integration. I do see the CPI on your SAP PI system as a good option to run some of your content. You probably want to start a migration if you are on a dual stack system, I have some resources on how you can do an SAP PI migration project. If you have Seeburger and want to migrate to B2B Add-on I created a webinar on how you can automate the migration. I also recorded a podcast on how a customer did a migration of Seeburger to B2B Add-on.

After you have been going thru your ISA-M you will have some integration patterns that you need new tools for. I’m covering SAP Cloud offerings for integration and their full iPaaS product. I think it would be wise to use the SAP tools first to see if they suit your needs and if not then you can find a better vendor for the solution. SAP will be adding new functions to the Cloud Offering to address the customers needs.

Operations

There is a need to make more integration at a faster pace. And you are probably not able to get more people on your team. So it is about making them as effective as possible. At Figaf we have created solutions to enable the development process to be a little easier from development, documentation, testing and supporting. You can check our tool Figaf IRT that can support the full lifecycle. I think it will help you improve your development of new features, so you will be more flexible and develop things faster.

Next week I’m hosting a webinar where I’ll cover how you can use the Figaf IRT tool to optimize your SAP PI and CPI development process.

Signup for webinar on Speeding up integration

 

View the presentation

You can watch the full video here.

 

 

026 – Migrating to SAP B2B Add-On

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Today I discuss B2B migration with Kishore Enumula.  Kishore works with the Salling Group (Dansk Supermarket Group) one of the biggest retailers in Denmark. He has just been leading a migration from Seeburger BIC to B2B Add-on from SAP. I see that many consumers are moving away from Seeburger and starting to use SAP B2B Add-on.  Salling Group decided to migrate because they were their database had limited future support. They had no choice but to stop using the Seeburger tools. They had around 60-70 different message mapping they needed to migrate.  The entire process took about six months to complete.

Salling had 2000 partners listed in the Trading Partner Management (TPM) tool. They used the API to re-create all the partners because it would have been too difficult to manually enter all that information.  There were some performance problems and they needed to improve the CPA object cache to have all the partners defined. TPM also gave a good visibility to how was the active partners.

They created completely new mappings to the new structure, which gave the option to remove some of the old bad habits and use the new B2B functions.

In this podcast we also discuss:

  • Reasons why migration
  • Project time span and planning 
  • They build a tool for EDI team to manage the partners.
  • TPM performance was good once they enhanced the cache
  • Longtime archiving of EDI Messages. 

Figaf notes on the project

If you are considering a migration project do listen to the podcast and get the takeaways from it.

We have two offerings that will help in the process.

  • Seeburger migration tool. This will take the Seeburger Mapping and convert the structure of B2B Add-on. This will allow you to save many hours on the structure conversions. Read more on how it works on your SAP PI/PO system.
  • The other is Figaf IRT a test tool that makes it easier to set up tests and run them. It supports EDIFACT/X12 comparison and the B2B Splitter. It have a lot of features and can be used for more than just the b2b migration. So it supports the full development lifecycle of SAP PI. Check it out at https://figaf.com/IRT.

024 – SAP Integration and API

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In this show I’m thrilled to have Harsh Jegadeesan, who is a product manager from SAP. He is responsible to for quite a few of the integration product as SAP and has a strong presence in SAP progress to API. It was a really interesting conversation where we covered a lot about what was going on with integration at SAPTeched and SAP in general.

This is the first time I do a live interview and in a bit noisy setting, but it should be possible to hear what we are talking about.

We do cover quite a few interesting things on the show.

  • Using API as a way to remove the complexity of your landscape, as the bedsheet you use to throw over your bed to cover the mesh.
  • Why is the API different than the Enterprise SOA. One of the differences Harsh mentioned was that E-SOA was a waterfall approach whereas the API is a lot more agile. SAP is using the same API for UI so they will do a better job understanding them.
  • We talk about API and how to implement them in a customer landscape and how SAP is thinking about API.
  • Open connectors: One interesting point I took away from it was that it was more a hub model. So you could have to multiply ie. CRM system and then you would just all the Open Connector with one standard interface, then Open Connector would ensure it is delivered to the correct CRM system if organizations use different settings.
  • We talk about the Cloud Integration Suite and where it fits into the customer’s journey.

If you found it interesting please share it.

 

022 – SAP Teched Barcelona prep for integration

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In this episode, I’ll be sharing some of the most interesting sessions from the SAP Teched Agenda. There are two learning journeys of interest. Learning journeys is a grouping of the session that is relevant for a user. It makes it a lot easier than searching for the product names as I did earlier. The two main ones are.

INT1 – Integrate Data and Processes End-to-End in a Hybrid Landscape

Learn how to configure, deploy, and monitor end-to-end integration scenarios across SAP and non-SAP applications in a hybrid system landscape.

INT2 – Master Integration Technologies

Become an expert in our integration technology portfolio, spanning cloud-based integration supporting A2A and B2B integration scenarios, hybrid integration, and scenario-driven API design, and discover prepackaged integration content.

My Agenda

On my agenda, I have the following

There is quite a lot of session of interest for SAP Integration since it is a big topic for customers. I guess SAP have also been adding a lot some more tools to the Cloud Integration offering to support customers. I recommend checking out the Cloud Platform Suite sessions.

  • INT102 Integration Architectures for Hybrid System Landscapes
  • INT101 Our Integration Platform-as-a-Service Offering on SAP Cloud Platform
  • CS100  Becoming an Influencer (just because I speaking)
  • AIN304  Craft and Execute Your Digital Strategy with APIs using SAP Cloud Platform
  • INT360  Extending Cloud Solutions with Workflow and Integration
  • INT366 Integration of Business Partners (B2B) Leveraging Integration as a Service

Also be sure to check out my blog on what is happening on SAP Integration at Teched. I shared my biggest takeaways from the Las Vegas event in this blog on SAP Integration.

 

You can also watch the Youtube live session I did on the topic.

Looking forward to meeting you in Barcelona, remember to say hi. 

 

021 – IFG Integration day with program

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A few months ago I shared a little about the IFG survey and the big event that we have planned for SAP Integration. A two day about what is happening with all SAP Integration. It is arranged by the Swedish SAP user group SAPSA taking place 5 to 6 November in Stockholm. In this episode I’m talking with Pontus Borgstrom Integration Architect at SKF and board member of SAPSA.

One of the reasons that I think it will be cool is there is quite a number of presentations from partners and SAP customers about their projects. I think this is where you will learn what is going on in the market and your pears is doing. SAP will also be presenting a lot of what they have been doing and their roadmaps. There will also be plenty of time for networking get to talk with fellow integration developer or architects to hear what they are doing.

There will also be some hands-on sessions (with some cloud systems) or demos that show something of what is going on with the integration.

It is an event focused on SAP Integration, so if you are interested in integration this is the event to go to.

You can register at the link below. If you are a part of your user group the price is just 100 EUR per day.

 

IFG Integration Days 2018

I do hope to see you there. I’ll be presenting some sessions on how to speed up your development sessions.

020 – Status of Enterprise Integration SAPPHIRENOW 2018 recap

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The cool thing about SAPPHIRENOW, which is SAP’s biggest event focusing on the business value of  SAP software. From an integration standpoint, there was a lot of interesting perspectives. So I created a webinar where I was covering some of the big change happening and what I believed people should start considering when working with SAP Integration.

Integration is going to be a lot more complicated over the next period of time, so you need to figure out how to position your SAP PI/PO system vs the Cloud Integration system.

For SAP to be successful they must enable customers integration. So there was a big focus on integration. Some of the topics covered in this podcast are S4 Integration, API management, SAP Cloud Platform, Open Connector, SAP Cloud Integration, prepackaged content.

You can also watch the slides here

Or watch the video

 

Check out our testing tool to improve your development speed at http://figaf.com/IRT