How to Connect SAP ERP with Your eCommerce Platform | Integration Guide
3 min read ● Silk Team
SAP ERP INTEGRATION FOR ECOMMERCE: A PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE
An eCommerce business is a lot like a restaurant. When your front-of-house staff don’t know what’s happening in the kitchen, your customers are going to have a bad experience. That’s exactly what happens when an eCommerce business runs without an integrated SAP ERP solution — there’s no coordination between your online storefront and your back office. Orders disappear, your inventory is only as good as your last wild guess, and your customers will stop shopping at your store.
However, when you integrate your SAP ERP solution with your eCommerce platform, you’ll be able to run your business from one single system. This means that when a sale is made through your online store, it will immediately be processed in your back office.
Growing Businesses Need To Integrate Their eCommerce Platform With Their SAP ERP Solution
Integrating your eCommerce platform with your SAP ERP solution is important for any growing business. The reason is simple. Without an integration strategy, you will inevitably end up with operational chaos when your business grows.
What An Integrated SAP ERP Solution For An eCommerce Business Actually Does
When your eCommerce platform is connected to your SAP ERP solution, you’re basically setting up a two-way street between both systems. This is called a bi-directional interface.
Here’s what actually gets transferred between your eCommerce platform and your SAP ERP solution:
- Instantaneous real-time inventory synchronization – Anytime your inventory level decreases, your SAP ERP solution will instantly reflect those changes across all sales channels so that you never sell something you do not have in stock.
- Automated Order Processing – All orders placed through your eCommerce platform will immediately be processed within your SAP ERP solution, allowing you to track the status of those orders in real-time.
- Unified Customer Data – Each customer’s purchase history, preferences and account information remains identical regardless of whether they make purchases through your eCommerce platform or in-store.
- Financial Reconciliation – Every sale made through your eCommerce platform will automatically populate your financial records in your SAP ERP solution.
- Product Information Management – Anytime you make a change to the pricing, description, etc., of a product, it will automatically update across all sales channels and platforms.
By integrating your eCommerce platform with your SAP ERP solution, you’re taking away the manual input of data from your employees. Additionally, when your customers look at your products on your eCommerce platform, they’ll always be seeing the most current and accurate product information.
Integration Strategies For Your eCommerce Platform And SAP ERP Solution
There are many ways to integrate your eCommerce platform with your SAP ERP solution. Three of the most common methods include:
Middleware Solutions
Using middleware solutions such as MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, or even SAP’s Integration Suite allows you to set up a connection between your eCommerce platform and your SAP ERP solution. Once the connection has been established, the middleware solution acts as translator between your eCommerce platform and SAP ERP solution and maps the data fields, manages the connection and handles any errors.
Using middleware solutions does require some setup and configuration. However, using middleware solutions greatly reduces the amount of custom coding required to integrate your eCommerce platform with your SAP ERP solution.
API-Based Direct Connections
If you have the internal resources, you can also create a direct API-based connection between your eCommerce platform and your SAP ERP solution. By doing so, you gain full control of the integration process. However, this also comes with its own challenges including ongoing maintenance, technical support and development costs.
Pre-Built Connectors
Some eCommerce platforms provide pre-built connectors that allow you to easily integrate your eCommerce platform with your SAP ERP solution. While these connectors are quicker to implement than building out a custom integration, they also limit your ability to customize your integration for specific business processes or requirements.
Challenges You Will Encounter During Implementation
While implementing your eCommerce platform integration with your SAP ERP solution, you will encounter several challenges including:
Data Mapping Inconsistencies
One of the biggest challenges associated with integrating your eCommerce platform with your SAP ERP solution is ensuring that the data mapping is consistent across both systems. For example, your eCommerce platform refers to “SKU” while your SAP ERP solution refers to “Material Number.” Your middleware solution must resolve these inconsistencies and prevent duplicate entries or errors.
Performance Bottlenecks
Another challenge you will face during implementation is performance bottlenecks caused by high volumes of orders or large product catalogs being synced between systems. Poorly designed integration solutions can cause your website to load slowly or delay order processing times.
Master Data Governance
In addition to the challenges mentioned above, master data governance becomes another major consideration. It is necessary to establish clear rules regarding ownership of data between your eCommerce platform and your SAP ERP solution. For example, if marketing makes changes to the product description in your eCommerce platform, and procurement makes similar changes to the same product in your SAP ERP solution, conflicts will arise.
Evaluating Integration Success
To measure the success of your eCommerce platform integration with your SAP ERP solution, evaluate the following KPIs:
- Time it takes to process orders from checkout to SAP fulfillment
- Percentage of SKUs that have the correct stock count in both systems
- How often your eCommerce platform data is synced with your SAP ERP solution (e.g. real-time vs. batch updates)
- Time it takes to resolve failed transactions or sync issues
On average, successful eCommerce platform-SAP ERP solution integrations can lower order processing times by 60-70% and completely eliminate the errors caused by manual data entry.
Getting Started
Before you begin developing your eCommerce platform integration with your SAP ERP solution, start by performing a data audit. Identify the types of data that need to be exchanged between systems, the frequency of exchange, and who is responsible for maintaining data accuracy in each system. Performing a data audit ensures that you avoid scope creep during the implementation phase and remain focused on your goals.
Select your eCommerce platform-SAP ERP solution integration method based on your organization’s transaction volume, technical capabilities, and budget, rather than simply selecting what your vendor suggests. For instance, a custom API integration costing $50,000 per year may be unnecessary for an eCommerce platform with low transaction volume and technical limitations; a middleware integration costing $500 per month may be sufficient.
Ultimately, the goal of integrating your eCommerce platform with your SAP ERP solution is to transform your eCommerce business from an operationally chaotic, fire-fighting environment into a proactively managed operation with clear data governance.