Integrate SAP and Salesforce (Faster Than You Can Say Middleware)

How some businesses are integrating processes across their Salesforce CRM and SAP ERP systems for better customer experiences

If your customer-facing employees are working in Salesforce, it’s critical that they have access to the core of your business: SAP ERP. Unfortunately, traditional integration methods to connect SAP and Salesforce require a lot of time and resources to stand up, don’t work in real-time, and create maintenance nightmares.

Using an integration framework that is built on the SAP application layer can deliver results to your business teams in record time. enosix integration solutions are fast, flexible, and portable with out-of-the-box Salesforce modules that get you up and running in just a few weeks.

Let’s explore how some businesses are integrating processes across their systems for better customer experiences and maximizing their investments to prepare for the move to SAP S/4HANA

Problems and opportunities

There is a transformative opportunity here for many organizations as integration solutions that eliminate middleware strive to create a truly connected customer platform with real response times.

Without these solutions, customer-facing employees don’t have access to the information they need to do their jobs. They must constantly “swivel-chair” out of Sales and Service Cloud to look in SAP for information while the customer is waiting for a response.

Lack of integration or integration via middleware also requires constant maintenance and manual input to update and streamline front-end and back-end systems. Businesses want to consolidate operations, pricing, and quoting, but they don’t want to have to replicate, build, and maintain that information in Salesforce in addition to SAP.

It’s clear what the solution is, but unfortunately, it’s not as simple as it should be.

Why integration is so complicated?

Each SAP ERP has unique business logic and customizations that have been built up over the years. Take quotes, for example. Within that entire process, SAP ERP contains customer-specific pricing, geography-specific pricing, currency conversion, tax calculations, and inventory status. These details compound with each customer and customization added to the system.

Traditional approaches require companies to download or extract tables (quotes, orders, pricing) and sync them into Salesforce through a middleware. Business logic is then built on top of this for the different integration points, and that has to be done separately for each one.

This leads to a spaghetti code of integration points that are almost impossible to manage. “Integration” in this sense still relies on downloads, uploads, and manual management, which isn’t sustainable and almost not worth it at all. Adding new applications is a nightmare as each integration scenario requires building from scratch over and over again.

The complexity of SAP, combined with the data replication needs of middleware, is not suited for the speed customers need.

enosix solutions

enosix is the only integration solution certified in SAP ECC, S/4HANA, and Salesforce that allows for streamlined and standardized access to anything in SAP. As soon as it’s set up within the Salesforce framework, enosix is reusable in any of the Salesforce clouds and applications, which reduces implementation time by up to 80%.

enosix has a pre-built front end that contains a Salesforce-managed package consisting of Salesforce lightning components as well as a pre-built back end with a SAINT install that is an SAP-certified add-on. As companies are making the transition to S/4HANA, it’s important to note that enosix is portable to this new platform with a simple technical reconfiguration. The front-end system won’t even know the difference.

Data visualization is one of the major advantages of enosix. Salesforce users are able to pull and view SAP data rather than having it replicated and stored in the CRM. Providing customer-facing employees with real-time data improves the customer experience, accelerates turnaround times, and streamlines operations company-wide.

enosix success stories

enosix works with customers from multiple industries and segments across varying use-cases, needs, and degrees of complexity to solve the common challenges related to integration with SAP

• Carhartt

Carhartt was searching for a solution to bring real-time accurate information to their call centers. They were rolling out Salesforce Service Cloud and about to invest in middleware integration when they saw what enosix could do. Initial implementation estimates were 9 to 10 months for the middleware solution, and enosix was able to cut that by 90%. As a result, first-time call resolution increased 50% and response times to customers were 25% as call center employees had access to information to get the job done faster.

• Stanley Black & Decker

The hardware manufacturer had used SAP and Salesforce for many years and wanted to streamline quotes to bring them into Salesforce. Up until enosix, they were working out of spreadsheets and email approvals. The biggest challenge in this case was variant configuration.

enosix was able to integrate SAP materials and pricing as well as SAP variant configuration that allowed them to perform it from the Salesforce CPQ interface and validate it against SAP information. This resulted in 75% reduction in order creation development costs and eliminated the need to replicate pricing and configurations.

• American Air Filter

AAF wanted to bring functionality and self-service to their B2B distributors and partners to streamline ordering and make it as easy as possible for their network to do business with them. They had been using middleware to integrate SAP and Salesforce up until that point.

Within three months of using enosix, AAF’s distributor community grew from 100 to 1,000. Partners and distributors now had real-time access to inventory, pricing, invoices, deliveries, and order history. The improved self-service experience fulfilled the needs of their B2B customers in an eCommerce space.

Webinar: Integrate SAP and Salesforce

97% of executives say that digital transformation is their top priority, but 84% of projects are stalled by integration challenges. Overcome these challenges with enosix’s integration solutions that allow you to move at the speed of your customer, not the speed of your ERP.