How Long Does an SAP Integration Project Take to Complete?

Real-time integration in only 20% of the time of other solutions, with no coding? It’s not impossible — it’s enosix

Key Takeaways:

• Traditional SAP integration can take 9 to 12 months, but enosix no-code solutions can get your integration completed in as little as a day
• Middleware is only a partial solution to today’s real-time SAP integration needs
• DIY integrations are mistake-prone, issue-prone, and take forever with all the required coding and testing.
• Solutions like ETL and iPaaS aren’t any better
• enosix is the only viable solution for enterprises who want to realize a true, real-time digital transformation, fast

SAP integration. It’s a phrase that can strike fear into the heart of IT and business executives alike. You know it’s necessary, but who can afford the 9 to 12 months a standard implementation project takes? Then there’s the fear of inaccuracies created by the middleware used for integration.

The business logic is complex, SAP ERP systems have peculiarities that make integration difficult, and the technology used in middleware integrations has many issues.

How would you like your SAP integration to be up and running in as little as a day?

enosix Surface real-time integration is a pre-built solution that requires no complex front-end coding, middleware, ETL tools, data mapping, or syncing. enosix Surface delivers real-time SAP access to give your Salesforce or other front-end systems a single source of truth.

We’re the only integration platform that runs INSIDE SAP. This means all API calls, database queries, and other transactions are made inside SAP, and all of the logic that combines the results is in SAP, too.

Why other integration solutions take way too much time

Middleware offers only a partial SAP integration solution because it’s not a very good translator. Let’s look at a real-world example:

Your e-commerce platform needs a price that, to get right, requires custom logic performed in a particular order. To achieve this outside of SAP, you have to recreate all that logic in the front-end, in each and every front-end that needs to get a price. This means recreating the same information over and over and hoping you don’t make a mistake. Don’t forget to test everything again to make sure all these systems work the same.

Middleware, sadly, can only reuse about 40% of logic across projects, so the first part of any project is doing a deep dive to figure out exactly what the logic was in your data before SAP started using it. It’s a time- and money-suck, because you have to recreate, test, fix, test, fix, test … You spend time and money to test or you risk losing even more cash because something is wrong.

What about DIY SAP integration?

Building an SAP integration on your own is incredibly complicated and issue-prone.

To call SAP from outside effectively requires an understanding of SAP nomenclature, and all of the table and field names are in German. You also need to know the available SAP BAPI calls and RFCs, BAPI-specific criteria for successful transactions, the business process, the correct call order, and how to capture and handle errors or warnings, among other things that require front-end developers to work closely with the SAP team.

As you can imagine, this greatly increases development time. Need to make a change? Chalk up even more time.

You’ll also suffer reduced performance with a DIY integration because you’re working with more data, and you’ll need to send more requests from outside SAP. Note that, every time you get an object (including getting the initial default values when creating a new one and getting the successful object back after a create or update), you will need to piece together dozens of tables, which makes front-end code slow, complicated, and messy.

Then there are potential stability issues with the JCo server. If internal development teams don’t build the JCo application correctly, it could lead to uncommitted transactions or crashes, which will require periodic reboots and could result in lost orders and down time.

Don’t forget that SAP has announced they are cutting off support for ECC in 2027 (in some cases 2030).  This means that all ECC customers are likely to have to move to S/4HANA within that time frame. Because the APIs for S/4HANA are completely different, if you build a DIY integration for ECC, it will have to be completely redone at the switch, adding both millions of dollars and months to the conversion project. (Whereas enosix integration will actually help make your move to S/4HANA easier.)

Other solutions aren’t really better

SAP integrations that rely on ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) and iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) methods create the same issues as the DIY option, but they add a layer of complexity if you want to make a change. A change in one place means a corresponding change in the ETL or iPaas.

The other variant of DIY is PI/PO, which uses IDocs. This makes all interfaces the same, but you lose the power to make direct API calls, while the front-end has to convert data between its structures and the IDoc. It’s likely your front-end isn’t flexible enough to handle this parsing, and performance is decreased.

enosix makes SAP ERP integrations simple, reliable, and fast. Really fast.

Our SAP ECC- and S/4HANA-certified integration platform gives you the ability to deliver real-time, bi-directional integrations between your SAP ERP and front-end systems 70% to 90% faster and less expensively than any other competing approach.

Our next-generation integration technology delivers on the promise of intelligent enterprise with true transformation. We’ve created a new standard for SAP integration by tossing out the old, tired middleware philosophy to provide real-time access to your ERP in all of your front-end systems.

Reduced risk through re-use of business logic

Don’t duplicate your logic, use it where it lives. The core of our technology lives inside your SAP system, which means you can leverage all of your existing processes, custom fields, business logic, and security without the risk of reproducing these processes (and the errors this brings) in middleware or front-end apps.

No coding

Music to your ears, right? With enosix, our code lives inside SAP, and it calls the database to do the work directly. The front-end makes a single API call, enosix does the work and returns the 10 rows of data.

Now, if your integration work happens outside SAP, you have to make a separate call for each table — or even multiple calls per table if you need more than just a couple fields —get back thousands, millions, or even trillions of rows, and work with them all in the front-end to get the answer. Plus, you have to rebuild all that joining and filtering logic for each project.

Plug-and-play for real-time pricing

This approach to integrations allows real-time price customization, even for custom parts and orders. Right now, things like suppliers, pricing, and timeframes are in SAP, which means most manufacturers take a request for quote, run the numbers overnight, and get that pricing to the customer the next day. By that time, they’ve lost interest, a more agile organization had every chance to swoop in and win that business.

Our real-time SAP integration means you can simply click, drag, and drop in a Salesforce Lightning object with no coding necessary to get real-time pricing capabilities in Salesforce. enosix Surface provides real-time SAP access and read-only data from SAP into Salesforce to provide common groups of real-time SAP data to users — whether that’s your salespeople, CSRs, or dealers and e-commerce dealers/customers.

Easily transition from ECC to S/4HANA

The enosix framework runs in both SAP ECC and S/4HANA and uses the same interface for your front-end applications, so moving is easy. Applications that have been integrated in ECC via enosix can be upgraded to S/4HANA with no need for rework.

Our integration solutions are the answer for enterprise companies that want to realize real digital transformation and provide a more connected, informed, and personalized experience for their customers.

enosix is your solution for smarter and faster integration 

Some of the most brilliant minds in technology are on the enosix team. In fact, our products were created by SAP experts with a vision for smarter integration. Our patent-pending integration solutions are instrumental in the evolution of the customer experience economy. They help your enterprise deliver on your customer experience promises by integrating complex business processes across common boundaries to deliver accelerated implementation and immediate value.

Schedule a demo  today to learn more about our SAP integration platform’s capabilities and the potential it has to transform your business.