SAP’s flagship on-premise ERP, known as ERP Central Component (ECC), is quickly approaching its end of maintenance in 2027. As a result, customers are beginning to migrate their applications, processes, and data to SAP’s next-generation solution, SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
The adoption of S/4HANA has grown rapidly, with SAP’s Q12019 financial report showing customer growth of +30% year over year. As customers embark on this challenging, multi-year journey, they face entirely new integration challenges. To overcome these challenges, modern solutions are required to enable a seamless migration and connectivity across a myriad of scenarios in SAP’s evolving, hybrid landscape. MuleSoft’s new SAP S/4HANA Cloud Connector automates and operationalizes core business operations related to financial accounting, controlling, and materials management, to sales and distribution, and customer service that are now moving to the S/4HANA environment.
Developed in partnership with global brands
We developed our S/4HANA Cloud connector through design partnerships with leading brands and a global systems integrator to ensure we effectively understand your core integration use cases and desired solutions. Our new connector supports all OData API’s exposed by SAP’s S/HANA Cloud service. It automatically discovers S/4HANA Cloud OData APIs, the related entities for each service, and via DataSense the connector introspects your underlying data structures. And based on the guidance from our design partners, we have:
- Optimized our connector to handle enhanced security by leveraging CSRF tokens.
- Enabled custom ODATA functions as wrappers for BAPI calls.
- Delivered flexibility via custom headers and query parameters that are needed for real-world implementations.
Furthermore, you can now transact with objects such as purchase orders, sales orders, and invoices, working directly with the product master data to make necessary modifications.
Enable new cloud-based business outcomes
As your business migrates to the cloud, you may find yourself working in a hybrid environment that requires continuous uptime with no data loss. For example, a single workflow may require connectivity between S/4HANA Cloud, an on-premises system such as SAP ECC, and an external SaaS system such as Salesforce. Integration is key to ensuring the smooth transition of key business operations across these environments. MuleSoft’s build once, deploy anywhere model abstracts the integration complexities of a hybrid system. And our new S/4HANA Cloud connector allows you to seamlessly migrate and integrate your new ERP. Let’s take a look at such a use case:
SAP’s S/4HANA Cloud service relies on different data models than those of SAP ECC. One such example is where ECC’s customer and vendor objects have been merged into a single business partner object in S/4HANA. Synchronizing data between both S/4HANA and ECC requires transforming the data and integrating systems to query the new data type. With S/4HANA, the data is accessed using ODATA APIs, a different format from ECC’s BAPIs and IDocs.
Product Broadcast in S/4HANA
In the following example, we create a workflow for synchronizing the product list across Salesforce and SAP S/4HANA. A MuleSoft object is used to trigger the integration when a new product is added to the Salesforce database.
Using Flow Designer, we add the Salesforce’s trigger object and the S/4HANA entity to the canvas. The S/4HANA Cloud connector supports several operations. In this case, on adding the S/4HANA connector, we select “Create operation” to invoke adding a new product to S/4HANA’s product master record.
S/4HANA Configuration: With our S/4HANA connector, we have a global configuration applicable to our S/4HANA instance. In this case, we set up the base URL with the hostname and port information.
Once our connector is configured, DataSense allows us to easily map fields between Salesforce and SAP using an intuitive, drag-and-drop user interface. With a simple transformation, the product is now created in S/4HANA. Our connector abstracts the technical details, leaving an easy-to-use interface customized for S/4HANA to fulfill complex integrations across all of our systems.
MuleSoft is your partner for SAP S/4HANA Cloud integrations
Migrating to SAP S/4HANA Cloud can be a complicated endeavor that requires the right integration solution, approach, and partner. Successful integration unlocks key business operations and ensures smooth and seamless continuity as your organization migrates your workflows into S/4HANA Cloud.
Accelerate your migration to S/4HANA Cloud by leveraging MuleSoft’s S/4HANA Cloud connector with API-led connectivity. The Anypoint Platform abstracts complexities of integration with a modern integration solution to help you connect S/4HANA Cloud to any application, data, or device.
You can download and learn more about MuleSoft’s S/4HANA Cloud connector on Anypoint Exchange. For more details and resources about how API-led connectivity can benefit your business migration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, register for our upcoming webinar.
