Achieving Seamless Salesforce Integration with Sales CPQ and SAP Variant Configuration

Two great business tools that work best together

They come from two different worlds. SAP is the strictly regimented master of all transactions that affect your company. It records everything and knows all — if it’s not in the ERP, it didn’t happen. Salesforce is adaptable, flexible, and the standard for CRM applications. It keeps track of all of the customer interactions that lead to those transactions that reside in the ERP.

The perfect customer experience is challenging to deliver under the most optimal of circumstances. This is particularly true when your most essential applications don’t speak the same language and are not on the same metaphorical page. Peak performance depends on consistent data accessibility for every part of your organization and all team members.

If your company, like most ahead-of-the-curve organizations, is keenly focused on customer interactions as a primary driver of growth, the need to integrate SAP with Salesforce is self-evident.

You have two basic integration options, and one seems deceptively simple.

The problem with replication

Trying to bring SAP and Salesforce together is an exercise of nearly unparalleled complexity. Sure, going to the moon was probably a few orders of magnitude more complicated, then again NASA has the political and economic will of an entire nation filling its sails. Most firms trying to pull off the perfect SAP-Salesforce mind-meld are working with a much more limited set of resources. That’s why many companies try the supposedly tried-and-true workaround in such circumstances: data replication.

Replication means mirroring what you have in the SAP ERP with another system. Below its seemingly straightforward simplicity, there are many complications and pitfalls. You must maintain the same data set in SAP ERP and Salesforce. Making it work means much recoding and accounting for thousands of dynamic data points that must be reconciled on an ongoing basis. This presents a multitude of opportunities for errors. Replication requires many more resources than one would think. Each error, and the effort and time needed to find and correct, it adds to the hidden costs of this “simple solution.”

Real-time integration is the way forward in today’s data-dependent business environment

As far as enosix is concerned, real-time integration is the only working solution that addresses the issues involved in bringing the SAP and Salesforce worlds together. Two key enosix tools make SAP ERP and Salesforce real-time integration possible: enosix Sales CPQ and Sales VC.

These pre-built integration solutions dramatically reduce the development and integration cycles needed to tie SAP and Salesforce together. enosix’s applications can get your integration up-and-running months faster than other competing methods.

enosix Transact fully ties Salesforce CPQ (configure-     price-     quote     ) into SAP to provide the only proven solution for real-time custom pricing. Imagine being able to produce quotes in Salesforce that faithfully adhere to your established SAP custom pricing rules, including customer-specific pricing, bundling, and any other scenario you’ve cooked up in SAP. This allows you to set all your pricing rules in SAP and nearly guarantee accurate quotes across the sales team. Once those orders come in, Sales CPQ has the capability to convert those quotes to SAP orders at the click of a button     , no additional processing required.

Transact also integrates SAP VC (Variant Configuration) with Salesforce. Once again, in real-time. Sales VC allows you to leverage the power of SAP VC in your Salesforce quotes (with or without CPQ). Working together, these solutions leverage the power of both applications to manage your full data set and make complete bi-directional integration possible.

Together, Sales CPQ and VC enable the holy grail of real-time SAP-Salesforce integration: true interoperability. The result enables your business to have SAP and Salesforce working together, each program buttressing the other to help you harness the power of all your data and deliver the elusive ideal customer experience.

Let enosix help you harness the full power of your IT investment

enosix Sales CPQ and Sales VC are just two of the methods by which we can help your enterprise fully realize the promise of its investment in information technology. We’re creating the new standard for SAP integration by leaving the “middleware” philosophy behind and pushing at the boundaries of what others thought possible. This is next-generation integration technology that delivers on the promise of intelligent enterprise.

Learn more about how enosix and its real-time integration products can enhance the productivity of your entire team. Connect with enosix at 844-436-6749 or request a demonstration of our integration solutions today.