Exploring Integration Capabilities of SAP Sales and Service Cloud

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

  • State integration capabilities of SAP Sales and Service Cloud
  • Describe the features and benefits of SAP Sales and Service Cloud Integration with SAP S/4HANA
  • Discover prepackaged integration content on SAP Business Accelerator Hub
  • Explain how SAP Sales and Service Cloud integrates with SAP solutions and other systems

Integration Capabilities of SAP Sales and Service Cloud

SAP Sales and Service Cloud offers a range of integration capabilities to seamlessly connect with various systems and solutions. These include prepackaged integration content, open APIs, and others. The following interaction gives an overview. Select each icon to learn more about each capability.

This course primarily focuses on integrating SAP Sales and Service Cloud with SAP S/4HANA, leveraging the Prepackaged Integration Content. Nevertheless, the capabilities mentioned previously are relevant for other integration scenarios and should be briefly mentioned here:

  • Built-In Tools for Data Integration are a set of features that allow importing and exporting data, for instance during a data migration. The most prominent tool for that is the Data Workbench.
  • Open APIs such as SOAP1 (Simple Object Access Protocol) and OData (Open Data Protocol) can be used to integrate with non-SAP systems or customer-specific integration scenarios.

    1: (SOAP has been deprecated and must not be used in new custom integration projects – OData is the successor and should be used instead).

  • UI & Data Mashups allow embedding and communication with external applications to create a seamless user experience.

Features and Benefits of SAP Sales and Service Cloud Integration with SAP S/4HANA

Integrating SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud with SAP S/4HANA provides several features and benefits.

Feature Highlights

  • Bi-directional synchronization of master data. For example: accounts, contacts, and products.
  • Full integration of transactional scenarios. For example: opportunities and quotes with real-time SAP S/4HANA and ERP pricing, sales order creation, and full accessibility of ERP document flows.
  • Field service and support scenarios in SAP Sales and Service Cloud with native integration to SAP S/4HANA and ERP. For example: service confirmation, billing, and finance, as well as contract management with SLAs and installed base.

Benefits

Graphic, showing four icons, each representing a benefit of the SAP Sales and Service Cloud integration benefits: real-time information for sales professionals, integrated end-to-end business processes for sales and for service, and standard integration content for a simple setup.

Prepackaged Integration Content on SAP Business Accelerator Hub

The prepackaged integration content plays an important role in integrating SAP Sales and Service Cloud with SAP on-premise solutions, such as SAP S/4HANA. This content (sometimes also called standard integration packages or out-of-the-box integrations) has been developed to integrate SAP Sales and Service Cloud with other SAP cloud or on-premise solutions. It contains all the necessary logic to exchange business objects with other SAP solutions, including message mapping, value mappings, and flow logic.

Standard integration packages are available and will be continuously developed further. The latest integration packages can be discovered through the SAP Business Accelerator Hub at https://api.sap.com.

Screenshot of the api.sap.com website showing the SAP Business Accelerator Hub

The SAP Business Accelerator Hub is a perfect source for integration-related information and a good starting point for all related activities. The main offerings are as follows:

  • Discovering available integration packages.
  • Viewing business processes and involved solutions.
  • Getting insights on the APIs offered by the involved solutions.
  • Testing APIs with mockup data or against real systems.
A graphic, showing icons representing the main offerings of SAP Business Accelerator Hub: a central catalog for content and APIs, prepackaged accelerators, and easy consumption for developers.

SAP Sales and Service Cloud Integration with SAP Solutions and Other Systems

SAP Solutions and Third-Party Systems

Prepackaged integration content must be deployed on a middleware, such as Cloud Integration, which is a capability of SAP Integration Suite. As the name already suggests, it is a cloud offering, hosted by SAP. On the other hand, it is also possible to use the integration content with SAP's on-premise middleware SAP Process Integration/Process Orchestration (PI/PO).

The following graphic gives an overview of how SAP Sales and Service Cloud can be integrated with other SAP solutions using either SAP Cloud Integration (in the graphic "CI") or SAP Process Integration/Orchestration (in the graphic "PI"). Integration with SAP Business One (SAP B1) is an exception here, as it comes with the Business One Integration Framework (B1i) where a separate version of the prepackaged integration content can be run.

Third-party applications can be integrated using open interfaces, such as OData APIs. This might require a third-party integration platform.

Overview of different systems that can be integrated with SAP Sales and Service Cloud with possible middleware solutions.

Middleware Deployment Options

SAP Sales and Service Cloud standard integration requires either SAP Cloud Integration or SAP Process Integration/Orchestration. The differences between these middleware solutions are as follows:

  • SAP Cloud Integration is the state-of-the-art middleware offered in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription model and is recommended for all new integration scenarios.
  • SAP Process Integration (PI) is the SAP on-premise middleware. Customers who purchased SAP Business Suite may already have a license for SAP PI.
  • SAP Process Orchestration (PO) is a new release of SAP PI that includes SAP Business Rules Management (BRM) and SAP Business Process Management (BPM). SAP PO must be licensed separately.

When integrating SAP Sales and Service Cloud with SAP S/4HANA, any of the middleware solutions can be used. Different use cases and circumstances make one or the other better suited for your business needs. Depending on your circumstances concerning the system landscape and existing licenses, you can decide between SAP Cloud Integration and SAP Process Orchestration.

For other integration scenarios between other solutions, this might not always be the case. For instance, when integrating two cloud solutions, it doesn't make sense to use SAP PI/PO as this would mean sending all traffic from the cloud to the on-premise network and back to the cloud. The same principle applies the other way around: When integrating two on-premise solutions, using SAP Cloud Integration doesn't make sense as this would mean sending all data outside and back into the on-premise network.

The following graphic shows the different deployment options:

Graphical representation of different deployment options for SAP middleware solutions.
Hint

We recommend using SAP Cloud Integration in the following scenarios:

  • When you are not already using SAP Process Orchestration.
  • When your integration setup involves cloud-to-cloud scenarios.

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