Driving Productivity: Automating Process Order Confirmation in S/4HANA

[Jay2]

Who would benefit from reading this blog?

Many customers use MSSQL to store local IoT data, which is later processed and transformed to integrate useful business data in SAP S/4HANA. This blog will help them to understand how they can leverage SAP Integration Suite to bring different systems together and orchestrate business processes.

I would like to thank gunteralbrecht for his guidance during this project.

Delving into a business use case - 

Process Industries are very much complex in nature due to the fact that they include a wide range of small operations and heterogeneous systems that help in goods production.

They have interdependencies on these complex systems which are interconnected and help in transforming raw materials into finished products depending on the demand which is received from the organization's ERP system, which can be S/4HANA (Cloud / On-Premise).

To produce a material within a plant a process order is generated and passed to the plant against which the production is carried out and later confirmation is posted on successful production. There are many scenarios where machine automation run in silos that do not have any kind of integration with the ERP system where production, consumption, etc. is posted manually by looking at the recorded data. Now will not consider the scenario where customers have tight integration of their manufacturing execution systems (MES) with ERP as this will be taken care of during implementation.

Let’s consider a Coal Washery plant example for a better understanding, of where there is no integration with the ERP system.

What is coal washery?

Coal washery is the process of removing impurities and improving the quality of coal which can be consumed in different applications. Different types of materials and resources are used in this process for cleaning and producing good-quality coal. Consumption of these materials used in this process has to be measured and posted back in the ERP system so that demand and supply of those can be managed efficiently.

To track the consumption of the raw material and production yield, customers use automated systems enabled with IOT and store the data which is later manually posted into the respective ERP system.

In the process elaborated above, the process of order confirmation is done manually, which is a repetitive task that consumes a lot of productive time for an employee. This is a continuous process throughout the year which needs to be re-defined and see if it can be automated to save the man-hours and cost associated with it. Manual confirmation has its own challenges associated with it, such as errors, delays, and huge administrative efforts.

Implementing an automated system to post the confirmations can remove all the manual intervention involved, and bring in real-time visibility, resulting in improved efficiency.

Automating process order confirmation with SAP Integration Suite -

SAP Integration Suite is a service provided by SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform) that simplifies the integration of diverse applications and systems, enabling seamless data flow across the organization. We will be considering the usage of key components such as Cloud Integration, and API Management to achieve the desired automation.

 

Implementation consideration -

1. SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)


2. SAP Integration Suite


3. Cloud connector installed and connected to BTP account in case an on-premise system.


4. S/4HANA API’s availability for process order confirmation.


5. MSSQL Server - This is where all the IoT Data required for auto-posting is stored.


6. Production supervisor can manually adjust / request to IT for adjusting the frequency of auto posting.

Demo video - 



Conclusion - 

By leveraging the SAP Integration Suite, Customers can experience a significant transformation in efficiency and cost reduction in manual efforts. This also helps you bring different complex processes under one unified platform that enables you to streamline the process. Please do share your thoughts on the point of view on automating process order confirmation.

 

References -

1. How to connect MSSQL server from SAP Integration Suite


2. How to handle X-CSRF token with on-premises SAP system using HTTP Receiver Adapter.


3. Using JDBC source in iFlow

 

 

[Dsk]

Good one ..