When looking at e-commerce solution with SAP ERP in the backend, you can be looking at a direct integration or at an interfaced integration.

Direct integration are solution like Sana or Weco, they are basically connected real time with SAP and exchanging data directly thru BAPI/RFC.

Interfaced integration basically means that there is an interface between your e-commerce and SAP. the interface could be an EDI provider, or a simple sftp, or a solution exposing SAP thru API.

Both approach have pro's and con's, which I will not discuss here too much. I will focus on the Interfaced integration, and explain one of the use case for which a company contacted us.

The situation:

Global company, located in multiple countries, running SAP ECC as an ERP. Willing to initiate an e-commerce project with India as a starting country. They decided to go for an interfaced integration with an EDI partner receiving csv file from the e-commerce platform and forwarding iDocs to the SAP, and vice versa.

Challenge:

1. Integration / data exchange between e-commerce and SAP is not real time.

2. Complex data need to be maintained on the e-commerce and require complex extract: price list, stock availability, product list, ...

3. Indian tax calculation.

For the point 1, it was actually not a big issue. We are in a Business to Business situation, goods need weeks prior being delivered, so 5 minutes latence between e-commerce and SAP was more than acceptable.

For the second point this customer already had in place a tool for data extraction, and therefore they took care of it by extracting data, putting it in csv format and then exchanging thru the EDI channel.

The last point was actually the real challenge, and it's where we came in the picture. The tax in India, GST, is having a lot of rules. SAP calculate this tax very well when entering the sales order.

In this scenario, the end user would enter his order in the e-commerce, and the order will then be in SAP 5 min later. But as you can imagine, prior validating his order, the end user wants to see the details including the tax calculation.

Solution:

First possibility, recreate the tax calculation into the e-commerce platform. To avoid discrepancy between SAP and e-commerce invoice, and also avoid maintaining two tax system, this option was discarded.

Second possibility, the one we proposed and put in place:

Using that solution allow:

Following this project, the customer decide to leverage our solution to integrate more real time information to the e-commerce platform.

If you want to know more about our platform, feel free to contact us. In a next use case, we will explain an integration with Sharepoint online.