Description

With the help of the business-to-business (B2B) integration Syensqo can electronically exchange business documents with other organisations. It allows Syensqo to extend your business processes beyond your organisation’s boundaries to include your business partners such as customers and suppliers. For enabling an electronic data exchange with those business partners, you need to align with them on common B2B standards, which includes document types, transport protocols, partner identification, security features and more.

This reference architecture is based on the concepts of the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology: Thereof, B2B integration is defined as an integration use case pattern which belongs to the process integration style. The diagram shows the runtime perspective for B2B integration covering the integration domains Cloud2Cloud, Cloud2OnPremise.

Involved Technologies

• SAP Integration Suite
• SAP Connectivity Service
• Destination

When to apply

An architecture for B2B integration can be characterised as follows:

• Inter-organisational data exchange: B2B integration involves the exchange of business documents between two or more organisations aiming at a high level of automation.
• Management of trading partner related information: B2B integration requires the management of B2B relationships with many trading partners. These include for instance reusable information which is relevant for setting up a B2B scenario for the electronic exchange of business data with a trading partner like trading partner identification, supported B2B standards, acknowledgement handling, service level agreements and more.
• Support of B2B standards: B2B integration relies on the use of agreed standardized formats (such as EDIFACT, ANSI X.12, SAP IDoc) that also include trading partner identifiers and protocols (such as AS2, HTTPS) to ensure compatibility and interoperability between systems.
• Secured communication: As B2B documents are exchanged over the public internet you need to establish secure communication channels (transport-level security) and configuring digital encryption and digital signing of messages (message-level security).
• Scaling design and runtime environment: B2B integration requires scalable a solution that can accommodate the growth of trading partner networks and increasing data load. In most cases, the options for controlling the load of B2B documents from various trading partners are typically limited. This may include optimized features for trading partner onboarding and management, processing of bulk data.

How to apply

Example

Many SAP solutions, such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, offer public APIs for B2B integration scenarios. In the following some examples in an SAP solution context are listed where you can apply the reference architecture for B2B integration for cloud deployment to:

• Supplier Invoice - Create (B2B, Inbound, Asynchronous) in SAP S/4HANA
• Sales Order/Customer Return - Create, Update, Cancel (B2B) in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
• Manage Just-In-Time Calls in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

In Syensqo, Interfaces between SAP ERP and BluJay are examples of B2B integration.

Architecture Blueprint Diagram

Flow

The flow and diagram include both the design-time and runtime perspective which allows you to better understand the scope, purpose and interplay of the technical components and solutions for B2B integration. The first three steps belong to the design-time perspective and are typically performed by an integration developer. The remainder describes the runtime perspective about how B2B documents are exchanged with one or more trading partners.

Let’s take a look at each step in detail:

1. The Cloud Integration capability within SAP Integration Suite allows Syenso to exchange B2B documents between business solutions (cloud or on-premise, SAP or 3rd party) with trading partners using B2B standards (such as EDIFACT, ANSI X.12, IDoc) and protocols (such as AS2) in a reliable and secure fashion.

2. SAP Business Accelerator Hub provides predefined integration flows, APIs, adapters and more to build custom integration flows which are deployed on Cloud Integration, including templates used for Trading Partner Management and integration Advisor.

3. The Integration Advisor capability within SAP Integration Suite is used to define and document interfaces (message implementation guidelines) and mappings (mapping guidelines) for B2B scenarios efficiently. It includes an intelligent and crowd-sourced proposal service which proposes message implementation guidelines and mapping guidelines with the best fit for a given trading partner: This is achieved by analysing how such messages and mappings were designed for other trading partners having the same business context, such as industry classification, related business process, geo-political location and more. As a result, you can speed up the content creation to deployment process by almost 60% using Integration Advisor. Out of these guidelines you can generate runtime artifacts which you can deploy on Cloud Integration.

4. The Trading Partner Management capability within SAP Integration Suite manages trading partner agreements which are complete B2B scenarios, reusing partner profile information such as identifiers, interface and mapping information derived from Integration Advisor. The agreements specify how B2B messages are exchanged with a specific trading partner (e.g. required identifiers, acknowledgement handling, B2B standards and versions used). Once a trading partner agreement is created and activated its information is pushed to the Partner Directory within Cloud Integration.

5. At runtime predefined generic integration flows on Cloud Integration can dynamically read trading partner agreement information from the partner directory to enable the exchange of B2B messages with a dedicated trading partner.

6. Whenever the integration scenario involves an on-premise solution (Cloud2OnPremise) it is recommended to use the SAP Connectivity service with cloud connector and SAP Destination service to establish a secure connection from SAP BTP to the on-premise landscape.

7. In case the integration scenario involves SAP S/4HANA or SAP ECC the SAP Application Interface Framework can enable integration monitoring and error handling for business users.

References

• SAP Reference Architecture for Business-to-business Integration