Before moving forward in the setup of an SAP Best Practices integration, check to see if the integration is supported by the free Cloud Integration Automation Service (CIAS). This service runs in SAP Business Technology Platform. The Plan for Cloud Integration Scenario app to launch the service can be accessed from SAP Cloud ALM or the SAP Maintenance Planner. If an integration scenario is supported by CIAS, you can use a guided workflow to partially automate the integration setup, instead of following the integration set-up instructions and completing the steps manually in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. You can also assign integration tasks to different roles to ensure the person with the right permission can execute each task, and the service tracks who completed each task in the workflow. The types of tasks the CIAS are:
- Automated tasks, where the respective applications provide APIs, which allows the CIAS to automate the corresponding configuration step.
- Semi-automated tasks, which may include customer-specific data to partially automate certain tasks. For example the customer tenant URL required for connecting systems to each other.
- Manual tasks, which will show the respective excerpt of the setup guide for the responsible person to apply the necessary setting manually before confirming the task.
Watch a video
Watch this video to learn more about the Cloud Integration Automation Service.
Accessing the CIAS
Not all SAP Best Practices integrations relevant for public cloud are supported by CIAS, but it's worth checking to see if you can save yourself some time on the setup of the integration scenarios in your LoB area. While the CIAS is always free to use, it does require some initial setup to subscribe to the service, as described in the SAP Help Portal here.
After subscribing to the CIAS, it can be accessed from two locations:
- SAP Cloud ALM in the SAP Cloud ALM for Implementation section → Cloud Integration Automation Service app
- SAP for Me in the Services & Support dashboard → Application Lifecycle Management tab → Maintenance Planner → Plan for Cloud Integration Scenario app