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B2B Integration Strategy

Applies to: SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, business-to-business add-on

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, secure connectivity add-on

SAP Information Interchange OnDemand

Summary This technology paper provides insight into the diverse B2B integration requirements and familiarizes readers with the different B2B integration solutions available from SAP (On-Premise, On-Demand and Hybrid)

Authors: Piyush Gakhar, Sindhu Gangadharan, Frank Ruland

Company: SAP AG

Created on: August 2012



Table of Contents B2B and EDI ....................................................................................................................................................... 3 What organizations have to say? ....................................................................................................................... 4

Cross-industry requirement ............................................................................................................................. 4 Enterprises Expectation: Lower Total Cost of Ownership and Gain Real Time Business Visibility ............... 4

SAP’s B2B integration strategy........................................................................................................................... 6 Brief Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 6

B2B – On Premise .............................................................................................................................................. 7 What is it? ....................................................................................................................................................... 7 Why this model? .............................................................................................................................................. 7 SAP’s Solution ................................................................................................................................................ 7 Solution Details ............................................................................................................................................... 7

B2B- Managed Services ................................................................................................................................... 10 What is it? ..................................................................................................................................................... 10 Why this model? ............................................................................................................................................ 10 SAP’s Solution .............................................................................................................................................. 11 Solution Details ............................................................................................................................................. 11

B2B- Hybrid Solution ........................................................................................................................................ 13 What is it? ..................................................................................................................................................... 13 Why this model? ............................................................................................................................................ 13 SAP’s Solution .............................................................................................................................................. 13 Solution Details ............................................................................................................................................. 14

SAP B2B Integration Solutions Benefits ........................................................................................................... 14 Future- Business Networks ............................................................................................................................... 16 Glossary ............................................................................................................................................................ 17 Related Content ................................................................................................................................................ 19 Copyright........................................................................................................................................................... 20



Why EDI is needed Business expansion via automated

connectivity with trading partners

Reduced manual data entry

Reduced postage and handling costs

Reduced labor processing costs

Reduced order cycle

Increased customer service

Improved accuracy of data

Reduced lead times

Reduced paper handling

Reduced inventory carrying costs

Efficient auditing mechanisms

B2B and EDI Organizations have been communicating across their company boundries for many years. Procure to pay and Order to cash among trading partners, financial (tax , wages and so on) information exchange with government, customs and shipment information with the logistics provider are widely used business transactions. This is a chain of processes across industry verticals, for example manufacturing, retail, telecom and so on. Bulk Business transactions across organization boundaries are defined as business–to-business transactions (B2B). B2B integration is costly and time-consuming. Only large companies have the expertise and the transactional volume to justify the investment in improving operational costs. This becomes more challenging when the connecting business partners are enormous. It is very tedious to execute, maintain and audit these bulk transactions using manual mechanisms such as paper, which results in lot of time being spent on communication. It also delays the execution of business processes affecting procurement, sales cycle, shipping, payments, invoices and revenue. Adherence to generic standards is necessary in order to reduce the complexity caused by different message exchange formats and communication mechanisms used by different trading partners. At the same time, enforced standards increase the entry barriers for business partners and add to the level of complexity.

EDI stands for Electronic Data Interchange and is particularly used in B2B communication. There are many standard defining bodies and non-profit organizations (for example, GS1, OASIS, ISO, DISA, UN/EDIFACT, WCO, Rosettanet and so on) that focus on improving electronic business capabilities. The specifications published by these organizations include technical and functional protocols. These protocols are developed with inbuilt flexibility to ensure fast and accurate integration between trading partners, to drive an easy way for business collabrations and to describe new eBusiness capabilities which can be used globally or for a specific industry vertical. These protocols are complex and practically very diffcult to implement if processed manually. As there is a variety of EDI formats

available for different regions and industries, designing an automated tool itself becomes quite complex. Solution is not limited to EDI and requires a good platform for catering to a customer’s end-to-end needs for adhering to both syntax and semantics, thereby harmonizing the complete business process.



What organizations have to say? SAP did market surveys, discussed in detail with customers globally and considered feedback from research analysts before defining SAP’s B2B strategy and vision. Let us look at some of the points that helped SAP in deriving the results:

Cross-industry requirement Almost all industry verticals (70%-80%) have urgent requirements to exchange information with their

business partners. Organizations want to automate their business processes (currently manual or semi-automated) to adhere to globally accepted standards for making them fast, efficient and going beyond organization boundaries. There is a huge volume and various types of transactions that are executed between trading partners and it is not possible to keep track of them manually.

Enterprises Expectation: Lower Total Cost of Ownership and Gain Real Time Business Visibility

Cost (voted by 82%) is an important factor that companies want to reduce by replacing manual processes with automated EDI tools. Another most challenging task is to make partners adhere to the organization’s internal processes (voted by 82% customers) which may be different from partners’ processes. EDI standards help to ensure this interoperability, yet limit the flexibility in the business processes. 81 % of organizations want to have real time process visibility for sales, inventory, logistics, procurement and production. This would help organizations take quick business decisions, ensure valid forecasts, set up an effective supply chain and solve inefficiencies in their business processes. 69% of the organizations questioned want to reduce the complexity of bulk transactions by integrating with their trading partners and sharing business information in a fast and accurate way. 74% of the customers stated that they need to have transparency in business communication, which is also required from legal and compliance perspective.



Accurate and fast execution of transactional data like orders, inventory status, demand forecast and other metrics allow for better inventory management and supports production critical processes like just-in-time delivery. Considering such business requirements, 77%-78% of the organizations want to have support for integrating with multiple business partners and quick on-boarding mechanisms. Organizations have already invested a lot in their hardware infrastructure and business software solutions like Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management to enhance efficiency and productivity throughout their shared network. While planning B2B integration, 80% of the customers say that they look forward to extending and leveraging the existing technology landscape for utilizing their existing skillset, minimizing the need of training for their IT and business users and avoiding adding a new system to their landscape. 77% of the customers stated that they would like to have a single platform in their landscape for defining, managing and monitoring business processes (A2A and B2B). This will help them to enhance business efficiency and reduce the overall TCO of the complex integration requirements.

B2B Technology Requirement: Support for different techincal protocols and message formats

File transfer (FTP, SFTP) remains the popular choice among technical protocols for exchanging messages. Other protocols include AS2, OFTP (ISDN and TCP/IP), X400, VAN Connectivity, SOAP and Web Services and RNIF (Hi-tech

industries Rosettanet messages). There are many B2B message exchange formats available that are popular among organizations according to the business requirements and industry verticals. These standards allow organizations to interact using generic data exchange formats and provide the solution to the problem of diverse formats followed by different organizations. The most frequently used and common standards are EDIFACT voted by 67% of the customers followed by Flat File (52%) and ANSIX.12 (45%). Other standards (TRADACOMS, VDA, ODETTE and so on) are also important and are widely used within different industry segments and regions.



SAP’s B2B integration strategy

Brief Introduction

SAP’s B2B integration strategy is based on the customers’ feedback on how a scalable and reliable B2B solution should look like. There are different organizations (small, mid-size, large) that have different strategies, business drivers and ecosystem setup. This diversity results in different B2B integration and interaction models (On Premise, Managed Service and Hybrid) with their trading partners. Let us try to understand the meaning of these models below followed by the solution details in the subsequent section.

B2B On-Premise (Software Only) B2B Managed Services B2B Hybrid Solution

Note: SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration is the new name of combined offering (SAP NetWeaver PI, SAP NetWeaver BPM and SAP NetWeaver BRM) from SAP under one license suite. From SAP NetWeaver 7.31 onwards, these products can also be installed together (with one system ID) with tight integration to each other. Both the terms (SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration and SAP NetWeaver Process Integration) are used interchangeably in this document.



B2B – On Premise

What is it?

This approach focuses on “On-Premise” (software only) use of B2B Integration tools where the software is installed, implemented and maintained within the organization boundaries.

Why this model?

There can be many reasons for organizations to adapt this model, such as:

IT strategy to have everything on premise Business reasons for not sharing data outside (hosted environment) the internal community Sufficient budgets to set up an end-to-end integration landscape within the organization. Requires one time investment instead of recurring monthly/annual subscription Frequent customizations and in house availability of skilled resources to maintain the internal

landscape Implement and maintain business critical scenarios in-house (eg. JIT calls)

SAP’s Solution

For many years, SAP has been providing an On-Premise B2B integration solution (Partner Adapters) which runs on SAP NetWeaver Process Integration. Looking at the market requirements and feedback, SAP has decided to provide the mainstream EDI capabilities and technical adapters that are tightly integrated with SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (and SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration). SAP’s Self-Owned on-premise B2B integration solutions “SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, business to business add-on” and “SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, secure connectivity add-on” have been available since March 2012.

Solution Details

As we can see in the survey results (page-5), many organizations want to have a complete on-premise offering to tackle their needs in the B2B integration space. These are mainly customers who have the need for frequent customization to their business processes. More than 50% customers (Source: DSAG Survey, Response Count: 85 participants) using SAP NetWeaver Process Integration responded that they were already using PI (with partner adapters) to process their EDI messages. This gives a clear indication for SAP to extend the B2B capabilities in the current stack.

Considering the requirements of customers for lower TCO and a single solution in their landscape which can cater to their end to end needs, SAP now provides mainstream EDI capabilities including technical B2B adapters as a separate Add-On which can be installed on top of SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration.



Available Releases

PI 7.11 PI 7.3x (Single and Double Stack) PI 7.31 (Single Stack, Double Stack,

Process Orchestration) De-Central (Advance) Adapter Engine

Enterprise Service Bus Single stack ESB capabilities by AAE, (dual

stack also available). BPM and BRM capabilities available with JAVA only stack

Performance optimizations Standard adherence (SOAP 1.2, WS Policy

1.2, WS Trust 1.3, Java SE 6 …) Technical protocols support (JDBC, FTP, JMS, SOAP, RNIF and so on) Reliable message deliveries Auditing & Logging Message and Transport Level security High Availability Clustering and scalability Decentralized architecture (no single

point of failure)

Central Repository for Content ESR (Enterprise Services Repository) provides

design time governence Eclipse-based design time for service

provisioning and publishing Unified WS-RM compliant event provisioning

and subscription Auditing and Logging

Unified Lifecycle Management Central monitoring by SAP Solution Manager User Level Defined Search Upgrade support and fault tolerance Root Cause Anlysis Message, Component and End-to-End

monitoring

On Premise B2B Solutions

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, secure connectivity add-on (SFTP PGP Add-On)

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, business to business add-on (B2B Add-On)

Business Process and Rules Management Define and Design Business Processes BPMN based modelling Business Rules Management Human and system centric processes Tight integration with technical routing

protocols

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration stack provides a 360 degree solution for defining and executing business processes, business rules, monitoring, governance and security mechanisms. SAP enhanced this platform to provide B2B capabilities.

All B2B components listed below will run on existing containers of SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration. SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration along with B2B Extensions will provide the complete on-Premise solution for B2B integration

The different solution components for On-Premise B2B Add-On includes:

B2B Adapters

Technical adapters include OFTP (including OFTP 2), AS2, SFTP, and X400 to carry out technical routing of EDI messages and support for technical acknowledgments (MDN, EERP, Delivery Reports). RNIF, CIDX , FTP, SOAP, JMS and other adapters are already part of SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration



EDI Modules

Set of modules that convert EDI formats like EDIFACT, ANSI X12, ODETTE, TRADACOMS, VDA, PLAIN to XML and vice-versa. These modules can be integrated with SAP PI adapters providing usability to numerous customers who want to have business conversations with different partners.

EDI XML Converter

It provides GUI for maintaining runtime schema information of EDI standards and generating XSDs for ESR. It also provides testing of EDI-XML message conversions.

Splitting of EDI Messages (EDI Separator Adapter)

The EDI Separator Adapter is used to split incoming bulk EDI messages into separate single messages based on the content of the message (e.g. 810-Invoice, 850-Purchase Order for ANSI X.12 format) and the Partner type. This offers the possibility to use content based routing (message identification) and split up messages according to the interfaces based on message type and partner. It also provides the functional acknowledgment capabilities (997 and CONTROL) based on different EDI formats

Archiving Module

Archiving Module and Java Archiver Mapping helps to archive the outcome of module chain processing steps and different mapping steps to debug/record the messages

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) Module

PGP is an adapter module that can be used with any technical adapter. PGP module integrates smoothly in the SAP NetWeaver PI environment and provides encryption, signing and compression capabilities.



B2B Mapping Functions

B2B Mapping Functions are the pre-defined functions (for example, Arithmetic, Date Time, Global, Node and Utils) that can be used in ESR to reduce the mapping time and efforts.

B2B Mapping Templates

Generic mapping templates for different EDI formats provide a quick setup of the whole on-premise B2B solution. RDS (Rapid Deployment Solution) will ensure the detailed mapping templates for complex requirements.

Number Range Object (NRO)

NRO is required to provide the option to insert automatic and continuous counters to check the sequence of the messages and restrict the outgoing messages to a certain limit

Rapid Deployment Solution

On-Premise Rapid Deployment solutions will have a bucket of mappings for business scenarios and industry verticals (Order-to-Cash, Procure –to-Pay) including services, which will ensure fast implementation and hence quick ROI.

B2B- Managed Services

What is it? B2B integration managed services describe a collaborative model between a service provider and the enterprise bound by Service Level Agreements. “Managed Services” can also be termed as “Outsourcing”, “Cloud” or “On-Demand” models. In this model, the B2B integration services offered are a combination of integration as a service, monitoring, support, maintenance as well as infrastructure set up including mapping, forwarding and managing B2B documents.

Why this model?

There can be many reasons for organizations to adapt this model, such as:

Organizations do not want to invest in buying and maintaining infrastructure, hardware, software and configuring a complete solution on premise

Want to have a trusted service provider who can manage all tasks related to the B2B integration (on boarding of partners, changes in partner profiles, business transactions, monitoring and so on).

To get the solution as an operational expense in a hosted environment and thereby avoiding capital expenditure.

Limited time to integrate with partners that can affect business revenue Limited in-house skillsets available to maintain complex landscape.



SAP’s Solution SAP has acquired Crossgate in 2011, who is a leader in the area of B2B Managed Services and helps a number of customers to securely exchange information with more than 45,000 business partners across multiple industries. With the full integration of Crossgate into SAP, the SAP Information Interchange OnDemand solution provides a simpler, more affordable way to connect with customers, suppliers, logistics service providers and other business partners for B2B e-commerce and facilitate successful business network transformation.

Solution Details The expansion and growth of a business increase the interactions with the ecosystem or business network that results in increased business transactions and connections with their business partners. It becomes challenging and complex when enterprises have to maintain huge point to point connections with different EDI formats (EDIFACT, ANSI, VDA and so on), business transactions (orders, invoices, ASN, forecast, payments and so on) and communication protocols (FTP, OFTP, X400 and so on). Managing change in specifications and co-ordinates from business partners becomes a pain area hence increasing costs, timeframe and requirements for complex monitoring capabilities. Companies have a difficult time finding staff to keep up with the requests from the various lines of business.

The SAP Information Interchange OnDemand solution enables enterprises to connect, transact, and collaborate with their collaborative business network of suppliers, customers, logistics service providers and other relevant business partners. Combined with SAP Business Suite and other SAP applications, organizations can extend business processes into their network without the need for expensive point-to-point integration, which is difficult to maintain and does not have the flexibility to adapt to the speed of business. Leveraging pre-delivered content for mission-critical processes, organizations gain instant access to a global business network that will continue to grow as more organizations and their business partners will join. It provides a complete message exchange chain that starts at the sending or receiving SAP application and ends at the business partner’s sending or receiving application. It comprises both service and support for the operation. This relates in particular to the maintenance and support of the licensed business partner profiles.

SAP Information Interchange OnDemand provides a central content repository with an enormous message format storage, rules definition, and technical routing capabilities. It is an effective means of communication for an enterprise without any in-house maintenance and effort requirement.



SAP Information Interchange OnDemand

A full B2B message mapping system

Partner Profiles based transaction engine

Various communication protocols support for receiving and delivering data (X.400, AS/2, (s)FTP(s), HTTP(s), OFTP & OFTP2 (TCP/IP, ISDN), SMTP, WebServices, Rosettanet and so on)

Tools and modules to support monitoring, accounting, reporting tasks

Message standard support (EDIFACT, ANSI X.12, TRADACOMS, VDA, CSV and ASCII Structured Data, IDOCs, XML, Rosettanet and so on)

Runtime module providing all workflow and mapping capabilities

Repository of relevant profiles needed by the customer to support the addressed business processes

The solution alignment of this unique strategy provides end users with faster partner deployments with less integration effort. SAP helps companies connect with any trading partner by joining the network once and linking with prebuilt business partner profiles. This full-service alternative eliminates the need for costly point-to-point integration. It lowers costs and enables further partner participation in B2B initiatives

SAP Information Interchange OnDemand becomes an accelerator for entire business processes. Enterprises need to establish connections with their business partner once for each process, for example, by utilizing SAP NetWeaver as the EAI middleware and instantly staring to exchange electronic documents, such as purchase orders, forecasts, invoices, and delivery notes using their existing SAP applications. There is no need for an enterprise to get involved in the complexity of execution and change management processes. End- to-end information exchange can be configured using SAP Information Interchange OnDemand and it acts as a central hub, which provides a one-stop solution to implement connections with business partners.

Partner Profiles define the names and identities of trading partners, technical protocols, business transaction(s), and EDI message format to be used for the communication. Depending on particular needs, a customer can have multiple partner profiles for one or more partners. It also provides the design and runtime capabilities to define runtime mapping rules. The monitoring component “Satellite” keeps track of the message routing within

different components. With all content being centrally located, it ensures speedy onboarding of the business partners, which results in a reduced TCO and quick ROI.



B2B- Hybrid Solution

What is it? As indicated by market research and customer feedback, many customers want to have certain segments of integration data on their landscape and the rest is managed by B2B managed services. A Hybrid B2B approach such as this is a blend of the “On-Premise” and “Managed Services” offerings. Depending on the organization’s requirements (considering factors like control of business data, critical business scenarios, SLA requirements, resources, and skills), certain B2B integration scenarios or business processes are managed in-house while others as managed services. Other factors, which contribute towards deciding for this approach, include the amount of business transactions to be exchanged, number of trading partners to be connected and standardization of business processes.

Why this model? Apart from the factors, which are mentioned in previous two approaches above, the reasons to follow this approach are that integration requires frequent changes and organizations do not want to spend huge amounts on change requests. Another motive can be that organizations do not want to share confidential business data in a proprietary format with the outsourcing partner and outsource only the technical routing capabilities.

SAP’s Solution

SAP models this requirement by providing SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration as an On-Premise solution and SAP Information Interchange OnDemand as a Managed Service, which together makes the “Hybrid Approach”. SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration is used to map interfaces for specific targets that are generic and reusable. SAP Information Interchange ensures rules, run time conversion, and technical communication.



Solution Details All features, capabilities and future enhancements of the Hybrid approach can be derived from the description of “On Premise” and “Managed Service” approaches mentioned in the previous sections. The major effort for developing and maintaining content gets reduced, as it is used from the central repository of SAP Information Interchange which will hence ensure faster on-boarding of partners along with routing of messages to the destinations supporting different technical protocols (AS2, X400, OFTP, FTP…).

SAP’s Rapid Deployment Solutions for the Hybrid Model will provide ready-to-use templates for quickly setting up the solution and ensuring fast communication. It encapsulates

Best practices for a secure and reliable connectivity set up between SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration and SAP Information Interchange OnDemand)

Pre-integrated (standardized) interfaces from SAP Business Suite to SAP Information Interchange (Mappings from IDOC into SAP II XML Format)

Efficient business partner on-boarding processes based on existing SAP Information Interchange repository that allows out of the box B2B connectivity to these partners.

SAP B2B Integration Solutions Benefits

According to the customers’ requirements and market feedback, there are many capabilities needed in an effective B2B solution. Let us have a look at how SAP’s B2B solutions cater to different requirements from the customers.

Reduced TCO and 360-degree solution catering end-to-end need: Enterprises always prefer to have one system in their landscape, which can cater their end-to-end needs including technical integration (including B2B), process flows, auditing, security, monitoring of business/technical data and business visibility. SAP addresses this customer need by encapsulating PI, BPM and BRM into a bundled solution known as SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration and providing tightly integrated B2B Solution (along with A2A) for on-premise customers. SAP Information Interchange OnDemand provides a bundled solution with all the required capabilities to carry out B2B integration in a hosted environment. Both these solutions help customers with reduced TCO (infrastructure set up, implementation cost and maintenance).

Templates for quick deployment: Predefined sets of best practices documents help customers to save implementation costs and get quick benefits. SAP is delivering out of the box content via Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS). RDS provides efficient business partner on boarding, reliable and secure connectivity, and pre-integrated mappings based on best practices. All B2B Solutions from SAP will be comprised of categorized templates to ensure fast implementation.

Support different delivery models and priorities: Customers should have the flexibility to go with a completely on premise solution for B2B, or address their B2B solution needs using a managed services offering but more importantly go also with a hybrid approach for B2B. SAP will provide different solutions for different customers need. SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration with B2B Add-On for



“On-Premise” customers, “SAP Information Interchange OnDemand” for Managed Services and combination of both as Hybrid Approach.

Leverage existing investments: This is always a key point involved in customer’s demand. Enterprises would not like to start from scratch if they have already invested in their landscape and would like to leverage the existing landscape, skillset and resources to carry out further extensions. There are 45000+ ERP customers and around 4300+ NetWeaver PI customers who have invested in these products. New B2B solutions from SAP are based on the same SAP NetWeaver platform to ensure reuse of existing content and come along with enriched functionalities that confirm tight and easy integration. The SAP Information Interchange OnDemand solution provides secure and reliable mechanism to connect to SAP ERP, the SAP Business Suite and the SAP SME portfolio along with the integration content in a hosted environment. No intermediary solution is required for these B2B solutions to connect to trading partners.

Support different protocols and message formats: EDI formats and communication protocols are diversified according to the regions and different industries. SAP’s B2B solutions (on-premise, managed service and hybrid) covers all major and relevant EDI formats (EDIFACT, ANSI X12, TRADACOMS and VDA and so on) and technical protocols (AS2, OFTP, FTP and so on).

Accomplish business requirements: Interface with an ecosystem or business network is quite challenging as interactions happen outside the organizational boundaries. There should be an effective tracking and monitoring mechanisms available to adhere to legal, compliance, and SLAs of the trading partner. All B2B tools and content are extended with the business expertise of the SAP Business Suite to provide excellent business values to comply with the need for EDI business processes, acknowledgements, auditing and monitoring.

Provide secure and reliable communication: Data need to be exchanged between trading partners in a secured, encrypted and reliable way. This is one of the critical requirements due to business risks. B2B solutions from SAP ensure this fundamental need of integration by providing encryption, signing, security (Transport Level, Message Level, and Network Level) and reliable quality of service.

Provide quick ROI: Organizations want to go productive as soon as possible after procuring the solution and spending a lot of time for implementation hampers their growth plans. The solution should provide a productized approach along with the templates to finish the project implementation with minimal efforts and timeframe. Predefined templates delivered using SAP’s Rapid Deployment Solutions, a central content repository and automated reports by business intelligence ensure a quick ROI on the B2B integration investments. SAP Information Interchange OnDemand provides the underlying infrastructure ready in a hosted environment along with quick partner on boarding mechanisms.

Need no/less-human intervention: The business process should be automated as much as possible to save cost (labor and paper), limit/reduce business risks due to typing errors and ensure efficiency with no human intervention. SAP provides B2B tools (BPM, BRM, Alerts, Events, SAP II Workflow Engine) to automate the whole business process. These tools are flexible enough to be configured according to the enterprise needs with automated and semi-automated processes.



Collaborate

Extending Business Network into people to people centric business social collaboration

Future- Business Networks

Business trends are changing rapidly and companies do not innovate, manufacture, market, or sell alone. Every organization works closely with other partners in the business network of design partners, suppliers, channel partners, outsourced vendors, co-innovators, customers – and even competitors.

The solution strategy towards business network will have a set of interlinked enterprise-centric business networks enabled by SAP applications – on-demand and on-premise. It will enable more and more connectivity to the network, for example: supplier integration, carrier integration, transportation tendering, and invoicing. It will provide an added value for the customers and the connected business partners through seamless network management functionality, such as visibility and monitoring, partner and process orchestration, as well as innovative collaborative applications.

Process data will be leveraged for easy consumption into dashboards and other usability applications. An insight into single and multi-step process transactions across systems and domains will also be offered to understand the conversation relationships between partners and business transactions (“which partners are involved in the make-to-order logistics processing”). Business Networks will form a community of partners with quick-boarding mechanisms, platform to collaborate, expand business, and exchange real time information with the community ensuring reliable and secure connectivity.

Transact

Deploy Standardized, pre-packaged best practices for multiple lines of business and functions that integrate to business process

Connect

On-board and off board partners quickly without worrying about future changes in networks standards

Real-Time Content & Insights

High quality, real-time information delivered at right time and right context to effectively drive business change



Glossary

UN/EDIFACT

United Nations/Electronic Data Interchange For Administration, Commerce and Transport (Message Exchange Format)

ANSI X12

The US standard ANSI (American National Standards Institute) ASC (Accredited Standards Committee) X12 is predominantly used in North America. (Message Exchange Format)

TRADACOMS

TRADACOMS standard is majorly used in UK retail industry (Message Exchange Format)

ODETTE

Used within the European automotive industry (Message Exchange Format)

VDA

Widely used among German Automotive Industry (Message Exchange Format)

EANCOM

Subset of EDI messages for commercial transactions (Message Exchange Format)

SWIFT

SWIFT operates a worldwide financial messaging network, which exchanges messages between banks and financial institutions. (Message Exchange Format)

FLAT FILE, CSV

One of the most popular formats for exchanging information via home grown standards. (Message Exchange Format)

Rosettanet This consists of a consortium of high tech industries (electronic, telecommunications and logistics) working together to create and implement industry wide electronic business standards.

AS2

AS2 (Applicability Statement 2) is used to transport data securely and reliably over the Internet. (Communication Standard/Protocol)

X400

Messaging Standard specified by the ITU-TS (International Telecommunications Union - Telecommunication Standard Sector) (Communication Standard/Protocol)

OFTP

Odette File Transfer Protocol (OFTP) is used for EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) between two communications business partners. (Communication Standard/Protocol)

FTP

File Transfer Protocol (Communication Standard/Protocol)

SFTP

Secure File Transfer protocol (Communication Standard/Protocol)

JDBC

Java DataBase Connectivity (Communication Standard/Protocol)

JMS

Java Messaging Service (Communication Standard/Protocol)

SOAP

Simple Object Access Protocol (Communication Standard/Protocol)

SMTP

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (Communication Standard/Protocol)



ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network, an international communication standard for sending voice, video, and data over digital telephone lines or normal telephone wires.

TCP/IP

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol

EDI Electronic Data Interchange

A2A Application to Application Integration

B2B Business to Business Integration

PI

SAP NetWeaver Process Integration

PO SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration

SAP II SAP Information Interchange

VAN Value Added Networks

XML Extensible Markup language

ESR Enterprise Services Repository

TCO Total Cost Of Ownership

ROI Return On Investment

WCO World Custom Organization

OASIS Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards driving the development and adoption of e-business and web services standards

DISA Data Interchange Standards Association: Responsible for developing cross industry message exchange formats

DSAG Deutsche SAP Anwendungs Gruppe (SAP German Speaking User Group)



Related Content https://scn.sap.com/community/b2b-integration

http://scn.sap.com/community/pi-and-soa-middleware

http://scn.sap.com/community/process-orchestration

http://scn.sap.com/community/bpm



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