Integration of Salesforce.com and SAP CRM/SAP ECC
Overview SAP is one of the most widely used enterprise resource planning softwares (RPS) to date, used by companies all around the world to assist and support various business processes. To ensure a full automatization and optimization of business processes, it is crucial to integrate SAP software with other business applications used in the company. The successful integration, however, might be a problem to tackle for many companies. The most common case seems to be the integration between SAP and a customer relationship management (CRM) application. With SAP software being one of the most widely used RPS softwares and Salesforce.com the pioneer and current market leader of CRM softwares, the integration of SAP and Salesforce applications in particular is a challenge that many companies are facing today.
Integration of SAP and Salesforce.com applications The integration of these two systems ensures an automatic and instant synchronization of data from both systems. The basis for such successful integration of Salesforce and SAP CRM/ECC systems is two-sided automatic data transfer from one system to another. When new information about a customer is entered into Salesforce it will automatically be available
via synchronization of systems in SAP, so the data will be made accessible for other business functions managed in SAP system in the company right away. Since the communication is two-sided, required information created in SAP are also available instantly in Salesforce. It is possible to transfer any kind of object, however, the most commonly transferred objects are various kinds of data from business partners, contacts, opportunities or offers.
The integration offers many benefits:
synchronization of data in both systems chance to use the existing SAP PI integration platform transparent monitoring of messages speed - data are transferred instantly use of standard communication channels safety – all incoming and outcoming communication is encrypted
How the transfer works? The best way how to explain the process of data transfer is by a practical example. Let’s say that a business partner is already created in SAP ERP using standard transaction mode. In order to send the data over to Salesforce, the SAP creates a so called intermediate document (IDoc - an SAP document format for business transaction data transfers) with all the necessary information about the business partner such as name, surname, address and contact details. The IDoc is then sent automatically to SAP Process Integration (PI). In PI the IDoc is transformed into XML message and sent directly to Salesforce. Salesforce then immediately sends a reply containing information about the business partner’s successful registration and with this the transfer is completed and data made available to financials, performance management, and other business functions managed by SAP.
API calls The messages that these two systems are exchanging are crucial to successful transfer of data and synchronous communication. Each message sent in Salesforce equals one API call (specific operation to perform a certain task). Since messages or API calls facilitate the communication of these applications, it is recommended to use BULK API instead of the SOAP API, in cases when the permitted number of API calls (approximately 1000 calls per user) is likely to be exceeded.
Integration scheme
Recommendations These are some recommendations to help you ensure a successful integration and safe use of both systems:
perform the initial loading of data into Salesforce only with the standard tool called Data Loader synchronize only the necessary data (to avoid 1:1 duplication of systems) pay attention to safety of transferring data analyze the amount of sent data before the implementation to calculate a required number of API calls
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