4 Critical Capabilities Every SAP Customer Must-Have in a B2B Commerce Solution

No business leader, VP of Sales, or CIO wants to spend months blueprinting a full-featured eCommerce solution and then begin the process of building and deploying that solution. The speed of business means you need to accelerate and quickly ramp your B2B buying experience, while future-proofing your investment so future back end upgrades (like SAP ECC to S/4HANA) don’t impact your customer’s front-end solution.

As manufacturers drive to upgrade their self-service portals, business leaders want nothing more than to accelerate and upgrade the B2B buying experience, while avoiding months of blueprinting and then deploying a full-featured eCommerce solution. One key to moving with speed is making your front-end commerce solutions future-proof. What does that mean? It means your front-end eCommerce solution should NOT be inextricably linked to a particular version of SAP in the back-end.

With only 14% of SAP customers migrated to S/4HANA, and many in planning stages, it’s more important than ever to make B2B eCommerce part of your immediate ERP Modernization initiative. Here are some tips to future-proofing your investment, by tackling the key components below.

Here we’ll discuss 4 key features of a successful omnichannel B2B commerce solution and why seemingly table stakes functionality must be thoughtfully considered, especially for manufacturers.

1. Order History

Within a self-service portal, customers should be able to see, and drill into:

• Order details, 
• Order status
• Tracking information
• Past Service Cases
• Current/Open Service Cases

Information for these various elements likely all reside in different core systems–SAP, Salesforce, and others.

2. Pricing

Presenting accurate pricing builds trust with clients and distributors. But pricing isn’t just a singular concept. It’s critical to reflect:

• Contract pricing
• Customer-specific
• Regional pricing
• Tier pricing

The key is for SAP-based pricing to be always-accurate with your commerce portal. Batch pass-throughs of data won’t cut it because pricing can change in real-time with scheduling agreements, volume contracts, and more. When a buyer sees always-accurate pricing, it builds trust in your company and in your commerce platform.

3. Availability

What quantity of a product is available? And where? This ever-changing data must be accurate for everything from purchasable SKUs to repair parts for service technicians. That means every order that is placed must be 100% SAP-acceptable to ensure you aren’t over-promising product or misrepresenting where the needed goods are located.

4. Checkout

This would seemingly be the most simple part of a commerce solution. But when you add multiple ship-to addresses and even line-item level ship-tos, things start to get complicated. Then you have to tie in the correct tax information and real-time shipping costs. These data points lie within various parts of SAP, but they need to connect seamlessly for a shopping cart to become an order which becomes revenue.

Behind the scenes of a check-out that order must flow directly into SAP, with no discrepancies or issues so the logistics team can coordinate deliver or manufacturing planning. Having your Salesforce B2B commerce connected directly to SAP ensures no issues with synchronization queues, or system mis-fires which delay orders being posted overnight, over weekends, or longer.

Get Both Speed and Functionality

As an SAP customer, you likely struggle with one or more of these capabilities–impacting your data accuracy and availability for eCommerce. After all, SAP was never designed to connect to a powerful front-end system like Salesforce. 

So how does your organization rank on these 4 key functionalities? Are your sales and customer service staff swivel-chairing between systems to take orders during regular business hours? Are they also having to field non-value-added questions about order status and tracking information?

Speed and functionality can be synonymous in your eCommerce system. See how enosix seamlessly integrates SAP data directly into Salesforce Commerce Cloud (or any other Salesforce Cloud) – with 100% guaranteed accuracy and real-time availability. The version of SAP you are running doesn’t matter either – ECC to S/4HANA – the same features and portals seamlessly scale and integrate. Learn more.