ISAP: What is your integration strategy, and what is driving that strategy for SAP Ariba?

Sanjay Almeida: We think about it in terms of how to start to simplify integration among all the applications that we have and create a ‘plug and play’ model. It’s not just point-to-point integration; we’re very proud of the 100 points that we have integrated among various business processes, but we think more holistically in terms of how we simplify end-to-end business process. Integration plays a huge role in realising the product benefit as well as faster ROI and simplification. So we want to make sure that we have a plug and play approach, we have a cloud approach, and it needs to be flexible. As you know, there’s no standard ERP implementation – there’s always tweaks and customisations that customers have to do to maximise their opportunity. So all integration has to be flexible to accommodate not only the standard business processes but also the custom business processes that customers have adopted.

We also want to make sure that the investment that our customers are making to this integration is future-proof, so as we add new functionality from both sides, it’s more a matter of turning on a few switches, versus reimplementing the integration. So these are core tenets that we operate under.

ISAP: Why is integration so important in the procurement space, and what benefits does full integration yield for companies around procurement activities?

SA: Procurement has a two-sided model – we have a buyer and a supplier. With the Ariba Business Network, we have 2 million suppliers connected to the network, and just last year, we had over US$1 trillion going through the network. When you think about the integration, it has to work for both sides – for suppliers and the way they manage their systems, as well as for the buyers and how they manage their systems. So this is supercritical; it’s truly bidirectional integration for two sets of parties – buyers and suppliers – to integrate with ERP. So it’s more multipoint integration than traditional integration.

ISAP: A lot of other players are relying on open API structures at this stage. Why have you decided to go a different way with your integration approach?

SA: We have two modes at play – for SAP, we have a huge on-premise install base, and then we have S/4HANA, which is our cloud-based solution. Our integration is flexible – we have integration to both on-premise as well as cloud, and the infrastructure that we are building is on the cloud. So we have created what we call the Cloud Integration Gateway (CIG), which is a cloud-based product that can integrate with SAP and for that matter, other ERPs through the cloud, as well as through the on-premise side as well. So we wanted to have a very flexible approach in terms of where the investment exists today from the customer perspective, and where the investment is going to be in the future, and how that seamlessly transitions from on-premise to cloud. We wanted to make sure that customers don’t have to reinvent the wheel as they make that move. That’s why we have this hybrid strategy, and created the CIG that fulfils the promise of seamless integration.

ISAP: What do you see as the key challenges businesses are facing in terms of bringing together a host of cloud solutions as many are now, and making them all work together for the business?

SA: When we started talking to customers, what came up all the time at the top of the list is “We have made investments today, we are continuing to invest for tomorrow, we have all these different protocols and different systems; we don’t want to keep investing into integration every year or every time we want to avail ourselves of new functionality”.

The other thing is that especially on the cloud side, the innovation curve is much faster. We release software every month, every quarter; we add new functionality, and customers are very excited to avail themselves of this functionality. But the real problem in the past was that integration doesn’t catch up with the innovation. So what we have done is we have synchronised our release cycles with SAP, S/4HANA and Ariba, both from an application and network perspective, so that when new innovation is available, it’s automatically added to our integration. So there is no waiting for customers to absorb that innovation.

That’s the beauty of having early access to SAP products: we have the ability to synchronise releases across various products because we own a whole lot of those. So the absorption of innovation from the customer point of view is much sooner than it had been in the past with other vendors.

ISAP: That’s helpful for customers who are pretty much wall-to-wall SAP, but what about other customers – how does the integration work for them?

SA: We have over 100 integration points and we have over 5000 feeds that we integrate. With the Cloud Integration Gateway, that integration is available for other ERPs as well – for Oracle, for Peoplesoft and for Quickbooks, because we know there are some customers, especially on the SME side, and some suppliers with smaller supply base, that use lower-end ERPs. Having a cloud-based integration gateway means it’s not file-based. We go with the industry standard that Ariba actually pioneered 20 years ago, called CXML, which is a commerce standard which is adopted in the industry. That common standard helps us in exposing those integration points, in the procurement products as well as some of the newer innovations that we’ve done in supply chain, payments, supply chain financing – all those business processes are available as part of that integration story.

ISAP: What’s ahead from here for SAP Ariba?

SA: There will definitely be more business processes that we want to integrate more tightly. I think supply chain is a huge opportunity for us. Managing that whole supply chain end-to-end all the way from demand and forecasting to building the products, delivery and quality is a big opportunity for us, and we have invested quite a bit and we’ll continue to do that.

We have a fantastic B2B payment system that’s been adopted across SAP. This is making sure that wherever the payment is initiated, we have an end-to-end process covered in this payment process. We also want to extend it into the financing side, so today we have multisource financing companies that finance our suppliers and buyers – we want to have integration for those and will continue to take that global. Asia, Europe and South America have different requirements in terms of how to handle taxes and legalisation, so we want to accommodate business processes which are local to specific regions.

We also want to continue to expose our Cloud Integration Gateway as a platform for all kinds of integration, whether it’s the Internet of Things, blockchain, logistics, supply chain payments, finance – that’s where you will see a lot of innovation coming out, both from the product side as well as the integration side.

We want to make sure that both buyers and suppliers are realising the value by having this seamless integration. We want to connect various networks – whether they are pharma networks or healthcare or banking – seamlessly through our integration gateway as well. So the strategy and vision around integration is not just limited to ERP integration, it’s going beyond connecting the world and commerce across the globe for various trading partners in the industry.

SAP Ariba’s Cloud Integration Gateway, powered by SAP HANA Cloud Integration, is now available for all customers.

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When tens of thousands of users switch from using technical developer targeted tools like Legacy System Migration Workbench (LSMW) to Winshuttle Studio – it’s safe to say the need for an easy to use, flexible and robust replacement is high. That’s not to say LSMW is a bad application or unsuited for a particular job. There is certainly a place for tools like LSMW, it just isn’t the tool to use for integration scenarios that involve a dozen or more data records to be created or maintained. LSMW was built by SAP as a tool for IT to utilise during deployment data migrations, and works great as a single instance tool. In my opinion, the issue is that LSMW has become the hammer that every IT department uses to nail every integration scenario that starts with data in a spreadsheet. This can become a problem not only for the end user, but ultimately for everyone – auditors, the business and in the end, even IT.

Getting started

Part of evaluating any integration solution should start with determining what you’re trying to achieve and how long it will take to deliver. Based on numerous conversations with SAP customers across the globe, the consensus is that ABAP skills continue to be in demand, and although the compensation rate is not nearly as high as it was in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s – ABAP skills still aren’t cheap. You don’t necessarily need an ABAP developer to create your LSMW scripts, but it doesn’t take long to understand LSMW isn’t designed to be used by end-users – in fact it should rarely be used in production data management scenarios, unless you are working with exceptionally large amounts of data. LSMW’s highly technical process to upload bulk information to SAP is time consuming and complex. Because LSMW typically requires developer-level authorizations, only a limited number of business users can use the tool to complete SAP data processes.

If you’re considering Winshuttle as a more powerful and easier alternative to LSMW, (the Winshuttle Studio Transaction module in particular) you need to look at the integration sweet spot. The data in this range is more than a dozen records and up to about 50,000 – 100,000.  In this context, LSMW is viewed as a ‘Big Solution’ or ‘Big IT Solution.’ Start thinking about Winshuttle as the pick-up truck for your general SAP application data management tasks that allows you to avoid needing a specialist to help you build Excel to SAP integration.

We recently pulled some usage statistics and found that in the last five years alone, Winshuttle customers have uploaded or maintained over a billion SAP records using the Winshuttle Studio Transaction module spanning hundreds of different SAP transactions from MM01 through FB50 and more obscure transactions. You can find out what automating an SAP transaction with Winshuttle Studio might be worth in time savings by looking at Winshuttle’s ROI calculator.

Winshuttle Studio allows business users to work within the familiar Excel interface to create and update data in SAP. It handles highly complex SAP transactions in three simple steps that would have taken hundreds of hours of development time in LSMW, enabling you to get up and running quickly, with faster data creation and process execution. Creating a script for a process is as simple as launching the Studio recorder and walking through the data creation or change steps. At the end of the transaction walk-through when you save the data and commit it to SAP, the recording is downloaded to the Windows desktop client and can be manipulated by adding more business logic like IF conditions and Loops.

In more advanced cases, you can use chains or linked scripts and even build data validation rules into the script to ensure that any changes you make to SAP data or any SAP data that you create, conforms to your business rules. Customers report that script creation can take anything from just a few minutes to a couple of hours, including testing.

Deployment

The difference between Winshuttle and LSMW comes with deploying and running the integration scenario. Using LSMW means you either have to package an LSMW session as an ABAP program or you have to have the data-file handed off to IT by the business to run. IT running the data-file is often not considered a good approach by audit because the data creation or change is not directly attributable to the responsible business user because IT or system account credentials are used. A massive and cumbersome paper trail needs to be maintained for these types of situations.

With Winshuttle, your script is completely portable, and can be embedded directly into the workbook by any user with the workbook and a Winshuttle Runner or Winshuttle Studio authoring license and SAP credential, allowing you to push, pull and change SAP data for a defined scenario. No ABAP changes, SAP authorisation changes or transports or SAP change management is necessary in order to get started with working with SAP Application Data from an Excel environment almost immediately.

Learn more about the specific differences between the Winshuttle approach to data integration as compared with LSMW by downloading the An Easy, Flexible Alternative to LSMW for Business Users white paper.

This article is sponsored by Winshuttle.

Clinton Jones is a Director for Finance Solutions Management at Winshuttle where he has worked since 2009. He is internationally experienced having worked on finance technologies and business process with a particular focus on integrated business solutions in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and North America. Clinton serves as a technical consultant on technology and quality management as it relates to data and process management and governance for finance organizations globally. Prior to Winshuttle, he served as a Technical Quality Manager at SAP and with Microsoft in their Global Foundation Services group.

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