Migrating to SAP S/4HANA? Did you know you can seamlessly integrate SAP S/4HANA data with the PROS Platform?
With the PROS Platform, you can seamlessly integrate with S/4HANA to develop multi-channel pricing strategies and manage multiple price lists in real-time – powered by PROS industry-leading AI. Or give your selling teams the competitive edge with PROS Smart CPQ. And did you know PROS has been a strategic partner of SAP since 2008 and is SAP Certified? It’s true. Plus, we provide native integrations to both Salesforce Sales Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales.
Watch this webinar to learn more about how PROS and BGSF have partnered to simplify data integration with SAP S/4HANA Private and Public Clouds so you can get the most out of your digital pricing and selling endeavors.
To continue the conversation please join the PROS Community.
About the Speakers
Greg Davoll, VP Product Management, PROS
Greg has over thirty years of enterprise software experience in product management and marketing leadership roles across an array of companies including IBM, NetIQ, Sybase, BMC Software and Quest Software. Greg currently leads the B2B product management team for PROS AI-powered price optimization & pricing management platform, including configure, price, and quoting (CPQ).
Santiago Londoño Velazquez, SAP Technical Lead, BGSF
Santiago Londoño Velazquez is a seasoned SAP Developer and System and Computing Engineer with a Master’s degree in Management. He holds SAP HANA and PO Certificates, as well as a Scrum Master Certification. With over 12 years of experience in the IT industry, Santiago has successfully led numerous SAP projects and internal product developments, driving growth and implementing best practices within various organizations. His extensive expertise and leadership skills make him a valuable asset in the world of SAP and IT.
John Antonny Jaramillo, Transformation Manager, BGSF
John Antonny Jaramillo is a highly accomplished Computer Science Engineer with a Master’s degree in IT Management. With over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, John holds several high-level certifications in Agile methodologies and innovation. He is currently spearheading the agile and digital transformation within his company, developing new organizational capabilities and introducing sustainable agile practices across teams. John’s extensive knowledge and leadership in agile methodologies make him a pivotal figure in driving digital innovation and excellence.
Full Transcript
Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Greg Davoll. I’m the VP of product management here at PROS.
Looking forward to today’s session. We’re gonna drill into S/4 HANA integration, and I’m joined by John Antonny and Santiago from BGSF. So they’re our preferred partners when it comes to SAP integration. So, today, what we’ll do without further ado is we’ll walk through I’m gonna give just a quick overview of the PROS platform so we can ground what we’re gonna talk about.
We’ll hit on a high level, the integration patterns with SAP, talk a little bit about the data constructs, and then I’ll pass it over to my partner friends here on the line, and they’re going to drive drill into the S/4 HANA private cloud specifically in the connector that we’ve co developed, and show a demonstration of how that works to give you an idea of of what’s behind the scenes.
And we do plan to have some time for questions at the end.
We’re planning for this to be approximately thirty minutes, but we’re looking forward to some participation from the crowd today. So line up your questions, and you can use the interface with the little question mark at the top, to enter in your questions along the way, and and we’ll take as many of those as we can at the end.
So when it comes to the PROS platform, think of it as a a set of capabilities that really span price management, price optimization, and CPQ.
So within the the platform itself, we have services for catalog, for configuration, for special price agreements, soon to be rebates, which was a big announcement in Outperform.
We also have subscription capabilities, real time pricing. So there’s a lot there. Specifically, though, it writes the platform has a set of common or shared services, including identity and access management. We have a data platform where data management, data integration lives, and we also have a science platform. But the area we’re gonna be talking about today is how you get data into the PROS platform and even a little bit about the, egress of data and how it gets back to a a given data source. So we’ll get very specific today on S/4 HANA because that’s our topic. But many of these patterns, that you’ll see today are also possible across other ERPs and applications.
So when we when we talk about data integration in the platform, we’re typically talking about datasets, that come from a third party data source like SAP.
We’ll be using terms like XML and CSV as really, the embodiment of the data that comes out of a given dataset or a data source.
We’ll also be talking about how that can be done kind of ad hoc versus scheduled, as well as full and incremental.
In addition to SAP, just so you all know, we also have certified connectors with Salesforce and Dynamics. We’ve been partners with those technology companies for a long time. And our platform itself is, you know, from a security perspective, privacy, and compliance, we’re pretty well covered as you can see with the certifications on the far right.
So you can you can see the breadth.
Not only do we have standard connectors for the common and top tier applications and ISVs out there, we also have, APIs on build with pros.com that can be used as a means to integrate, between various platforms.
So let’s get specific today and and drill into S/4 HANA and SAP. So PROS has been a technology partner, of SAP since two thousand eight, so many years now.
We are certified SAP certified with our connectors, and we have been with ECC as well as now with S/4 HANA.
We have internally a dedicated SAP integration team as well as we partner with BGSF as a preferred partner in this area.
We’ve done hundreds of integrations over the years.
I’d say, you know, roughly off the top of my head, sixty plus, maybe seventy percent of our customer base has SAP as an ERP on the back end. So this is a critical data source for us. We’re very used to dealing with it, and helping our customers get data in and out of, of SAP.
Now we are compatible with multiple deployment options of S/4 HANA. We have a connector for the public cloud and a connector for the private cloud. So we’ll talk about those differences today.
Before we get into that, there are common datasets between SAP and Pro. So we’ll be demonstrating this. But in terms of what we’re looking for in the Pro’s platform, our datasets that have the product master, the customer master, invoice data, or transaction data, as well as other datasets that are used, to really inform our platform of, you know, currency, Internet measure, etcetera.
The data loading, we have both the the initial data load that we’ll be referring to and demonstrating as well as incremental.
And then there’s the outbound, keeping SAP in sync with what’s in PROS.
Some of our customers use the PROS platform as really a replicated version of what’s in SAP, although we do have additional information, and we can fuel and power different channels of, price distribution.
That other customers will so they’ll see SAP as a source of record or system of record that is. In other cases, PROS is more of a system of record for the extended catalog and pricing.
So we support both situations and configurations.
Going back a little bit, our platform was designed with SAP in mind, so there’s a lot of similarities between even though the names are different and the labels between data and data constructs in SAP and what those are in the pros world. We do augment and enhance these objects in order to fuel some of our CPQ and power our real time pricing engine. But the basic constructs, there’s a lot of similarities and analogs between the two.
So with that, I wanna talk about two patterns, and then we’ll go deeper in in the second pattern here. The first pattern is what we’ve, productized in our SAP connector, for the public cloud. And so this is now something that that we launched and announced last year in twenty twenty three.
So this is part of our standard offering, and it allows an integration with the SAP S/4 HANA Cloud. Now the cloud has a specific interface, and so we’re integrated in through that API.
When it comes to option two, which is private cloud, there’s a different way to interface and interact with Sfour HANA, and that’s where BGSF has come in comes in.
So we’ve partnered with BGSF, to develop this cloud connector or, I’m sorry, this private cloud connector, and that will be the subject of the rest of the webinar today. So we’ll get into details specifically about how this works for private cloud. We have many of our customers are in the private cloud arena, if you will, and there’s some good reasons for that. There are some customers of ours that are cloud, that are public cloud, and it doesn’t matter which one you are. We have a solution for you. But, given the importance and, really, the the number of requirements and requests that we’ve been getting around private cloud, we thought it’d be a good idea to go a little deeper here today.
So with that, I wanna go ahead and introduce John Anthony. Thanks, guys, for being on the phone today, and thanks for, for all the great work today.
Thank you very much, Greg, and all the attendants today in this web conference. Appreciate this time sharing this milestone, this big milestone that we have achieved with with Pros. I’m John Jaramillo, a transformation manager for BDSM and also account manager for all the initiatives that we have around with Pros.
I’m so glad to be here. And this fantastic journey that we have started since the last year being the official Prost partners, delivering implementations in nearshore, offshore, and onshore consultants, and also developing process extensions and customizations and actually integration solutions as the one that we are actually seeing today. Broad was actually here today to show you this important milestone, as Greg just mentioned, offering a way to integrate SAP with cross and CPQ price management systems.
This native ABAP connector, SAP connector, certified connector by the SAP that we we are about to show you to leverage the interrupts between, SAP and pros using XML and CSV files, submitting all the information needed from price calculations and what we call the album data from the ERP to PROS and also the inbound data from PROS to the ERP, basically retrieving the price conditions and price updates back to back to the to the ERP.
Some some cool stuff that we have with this connector is the integration is completely configurable and pacing, you know, pacing the proper integration between the system and and pros, you know, the the pacing the the the proper timing, for integration between the two systems based on the business rules and based on the dynamics of the market. And, also, we currently, we are extending these connector capabilities for real time integration, and this is something that will be is in in development right now, providing real time. Today, we’re gonna be focused only only in the, you know, in the integration between sharing files, but this company will be also capable to real time integration into both services, RFCs, or API.
Can we move for the next slide, please, Maria? Appreciate.
Okay.
So if from I think with that, there’s so many opportunities and benefits with this, with this company. But the main four, what we see here is the, we are going we’d be using this connector. We’re improving the decision makers to have the right pricing information at the right time, to support, you know, better decisions and providing the most accurate price to the end users, the people who use and consume these, the pricing information. And also optimizing this. This is a super important advantage from from this company. It’s basically releasing time from the ERP managers and make the life easier, automating integration information, routines, and also giving the provider a UI to customize the queries and customize the frequency of the integration.
Probably these folks, the ERP managers are full of work and demanding the tax of integrating and being top of the proper integrated routines could be, you know, very cumbersome and time consuming tasks. With these with these connector, we’re releasing time from the ERP. Just providing a UI that can go into the system, configure the frequency of the integration, and giving the vicinity something features that we’re about to show you in a minute. The other one is decreasing the the accuracy. They’re, you know, removing the the, the human errors, getting the information, extracting the information from the ERP, and submitting the information to to cross platform would be easier. And and and right now, will be covered by the by the connector. And the other the other one is this CaliDuty and CaliDuty having a configurable, you know, configurable options to customize your query and customize the extraction information.
And also, you know, the extensibility that we are looking forward with real time interoperability. So say no more. Let’s let’s move to the to the to the meeting. Yeah.
I was gonna add, John, just on that last bit is while we’ve standardized, the integration between S/4 HANA and PROS, there’s still variances. Right? The SAP and implementations of SAP tend to vary quite a bit customer to customer, company to company. So we’ve allowed for that, tailoring, right, in this to to adjust for what, what a given company may have. So I just wanted to point that out that that’s, Definitely.
It’s a different part of what what we’ve got.
It is the b two b. Of course. So saying no more, I hand over to my colleague, Santiago Lindo, who’s the, technical leader of the of the development team for these connectors. Santiago, thank you very much. The mic is all yours.
Thank you, John. Thank you, Greg. Well, as John mentioned it, my name is Santiago. I am an SAP technical lead and also developer.
And what we have at this point, is we we have a solution implemented in the SAP system using the standard tools and best practices to to facilitate dynamically the installation, configuration, and execution of the different interfaces, so such as customer master, product masters, price conditions.
So in this case, what we are going to have is an FTP scenario to synchronize the the data between SAP and plus, right, with the periodicity that John mentioned it, dimension the the periodicity you want. So it could be each five minutes, thirty minutes, twice a day, weekly, whatever you want. So it depends on the business rules and that are defined by the company.
So with this from SAP, we have kind of two options to to run it, running delta instructions or running full data. So we we are good on that. But most of you would think like, okay. But if I want to synchronize price condition in real time with my other systems, that’s the thing that we are, testing and and finishing.
We’re going to deliver that code by, I think, John, in the couple of next weeks. So to use APIs between SAP and pros to synchronize.
For example, when you create a condition in SAP using transaction like b k eleven, b k twelve, so it will go immediately to send, to be sent to pros. So with this, all these scenarios are are covered by our SAP extension of the connector.
We will have a transaction to manage these connectors, templates and mapping. We will see it. That is the one that you can see in the right side of the screen. We’re gonna get deep in the in a demo. So can you go to the next slide, please, Greg?
Thank you. Well, and at this point, we we are going to explain a high level about about the options that we got. So first one is the interface configuration.
So for this option, we are going to configure the behavior of the communication of the interfaces.
For example, if we can configure we want to configure price conditions using the FTP or by downloading the the file locally in your machine or or using the API for real time. We will have all the credentials here, and required for the scenario, for the FTP or API. Or if you are going to download it locally. You just have to put the the route that you are going to to to download it.
The second one is the template configuration.
For this option, we have, the option to configure dynamically the combination of for each interface, what is the what is the query we expect with the fields, with the word clouds, with the mapping to the SAP fields, just to to map it to the process structure of the service. Right? So we will see all that configuration.
The third one is the log. So we can see the previous execution of the interfaces.
The fourth and the fifth, the options are related to the way to run the interface using the FTP.
So with with the option of full run or delta run depending on the business rules, that you have in the company. So and just like an addition of these options, we we talk about dynamic mappings. When we talk about that dynamic mappings, it’s related that we can create, modify, delete, activate, deactivate templates for every input interface output interface and also select tables, fields, the word classes, filters, and finally, we have the option to to preview the data that is going to be extracted and sent. So we don’t have to wait until it sends to see if the data is correct. So we can kind of do a test execution to see what is the information extracted.
So say no more. Could you go to the next slide to do the demo? Yep.
And I’m gonna share my screen.
Release this. Please stop sharing.
Okay. Perfect. So just let me know, Greg, when you can see it.
Perfect.
Okay.
So this is going to be a little bit quick because of the time. So this is the program that to manage the interfaces. We have a main program. And what we have here is what I just explained it.
I’m going to do a quick round of the options. So first one is the interface configuration here. So if we go to this setup, we will have here the the different IDs for the interface. So, for example, the customer master, product master, conditions out, conditions into SAP.
We will have the the file type that we are going to use, CSV, XML, text, and the destination type, mentioning that we can download it locally, we can use the f three, or we can call APIs.
Then we will have the destination. It will depends of if it is the FTP.
We will have to put here the destination, with the root and also the credentials.
Right? So for this point, we just have to configure this.
On that, the second, it is going to be a little bit quick, as I mentioned. The template configuration is the the core side of of the connector. So in this point, we are going to have, for each interface, we have to create one template.
We for this demo, we created some previously. So we are going to check, for example, this customer template.
So with this customer template, we can have one or two or three templates, but only one should be active. So we can just play with the fields and with the columns. But in this case, we are going to do the demo with this one. So we create the template there.
And we can just come here and select the the template just to start configuring.
If you are creating from zero, it will allow to to put all of this. But as I mentioned, we have here to define the tables. So for example, for the customer, I’m going to use the technical names of the table. So we are going to use KN a1 and KN a b2 b1. Sorry.
We can put all the tables we need to to pick the information.
So we just put the define the tables. Then after the tables are defined, we can define all the fields that we are going to need.
Right? So we we show here, for example, this one is for the first table, and this one is for the second one for the companies of the customer. So we can select here. For example, if we need the head office, we just double click it, and it will put it here in the select fields that we are going to pick.
And we can just save it and it will go back. So we will have tables and fields. Now, in some cases, we will need the the work conditions.
So in this case, for example, if you only want to extract customers by company code that we only want one thousand to two thousand, for example. We just have to configure it here. And also we can just leave it in empty conditions if you want to pick everything in the system. But yeah.
It will depend. And, for example, another filter that we can have is if we want to extract some customers by by number. So from the one to the another number, we just can have one of them by account group, by whatever you want. We can just do this in the in the word clouds.
Finally, here we we got the join tables. If we define more than one table, we can define how it is going to connect between the tables. So for the customer master and the company, we we can do the the join between these two fields, between whatever we want here. So it would be all configurable.
And finally, we got the mapping. This is kind of the output of we got the target fields that process needing to to synchronize the information. So for all of these targets, we have to put the source table that we are picking in the previous and the fields that we want. Right?
So in this point, we we will put field by field, but you will say, okay. But I need to do some particular logic for my business. So in this case, for example, I want the name that is configured, and I have to concatenate name one, name two, name three, and name four for the table. So we have some particular enhancements that we we are developing.
So it it is only to be configured here by the business rules. So we are not going to map a field. We are going to do some logic in the code to calculate that.
And with that, we will have here as an overview of the select the query that we configured here in table, sales, conditions, tables, mapping, everything. And with the in this point, we can just kind of click on here to view the result, and it will show, as I mentioned, all data that we are going to be sending to to PROS.
So at this point, it is only configuration.
We have here what it is going to be extracted.
If I go out of the template configuration, the the other thing is that we can just we are ready now to run the interfaces in a full or in a delta way. So So I’m going to run the the full interface. So it will go to search, for example, for the customer master, the configuration to see if we are using FTP, what is the root, what are the credentials, what is the template that is active, So it’s going to select from there all the fields that we selected with the clouds, with everything. So all that ten customers that we saw in the in the view is going to be instructed to be sent in the customer master. So if I run this customer master, it will connect to the FTP.
We will show this here, kind of, a lock of the execution.
So just go into the FTP we are having here, this file that is here’s the Moran, the time stamp that we control. And if we open this, we will get mapping that is the one that is needed by PROS. So PROS is now ready to come to the FTP, pick this file, and synchronize it in in PROS. Right?
So at this point, this is as we can see here, we have the ten records. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. So we are good on this incarnation of the of the customers. So we can do the same I’m I’m not going to do it, but we can do the same for the product master, for the conditions, and also for the run. We we will have some parameters to to check what is the delta that we are going to to run it by date, by by whatever. So this is mainly the the demonstration about this point. So I think we are good at this.
So, Greg, I think you can you can Yeah.
Thank you, Santiago. That’s great. Yeah. I appreciate you showing the detail and and actually what what the, the tool is doing behind the scenes so so that people understand, how that how that looks. So thank you. Yeah.
What I’ll do is just bring it back up here and then let John Yes.
A few words.
Yes. Just just a few words to give an idea probably are, the people who’s listening today watching us today, are interested in how is the process of installation. Is this the process very simple. It’s just your steps, just the installation directly into SAP environments.
It could be on on premise environments or cloud environments. This connector is available for both. So, the second one is the initial setup, things that, something we’ve just shown, you know, the initial setup of the FTP environment location in in some, frequencies and and how how often do you want to interact in some initial and very easy and straightforward configurations, and that’s it. From then, it’s it’s just support the from that we provide for a so support provided by pros where you can, access the manuals through, through the websites.
Customizations and new upgrades of the packages in in the company will be released through the support and the and the channels available for this. So it’s very simple. Three steps.
You know, put put this in in production is gonna be very straightforward.
That that’s it for me.
Perfect.
Awesome.
So I’ll go ahead. And while I’m doing this, please, for those of you in the audience, please submit your questions.
Wanna take advantage of the opportunity here, so, ask away.
Next steps as far as current customers go, please reach out to your customer success managers.
We are more than happy to help. I know many of you are, in the midst of some kind of S/4 migration.
Some may be on the other side, so congratulations if you are.
But either way, if you want to learn more about, how to take advantage of some of these new capabilities, please reach out to your CSM. For new opportunities, there’s a QR code here to contact us, and we’ll bring to bear, an expert team to help you.
And then last but not least, we have a community now.
So out on the community site, there’s a conversation that I started yesterday. So we’d greatly appreciate, people adding on to that and, hopefully, answering some of those questions I posed in the community post yesterday. So with that, let me take a minute here and look at some questions that have come in.
The first one, this might be for you, Santiago, but what does the installation process of the connector in SAP look like?
Wow. Okay.
So in in this point so for the integrations that we have from SAP or going out to SAP, we are not we are thinking that we can have whatever scenario you have in your architecture. So in this case, for example, if you have RFCs, we can call it by that. If we have if you have BTP, you can connect by BTP. If you have a gateway, we can just use that gateway.
So, we we don’t really care about the the technology that you are using. The the main point is that we need, the back end of the SAP that is coded in ABAP. And from that, we can expose with the different lawyers that you you have in the in the middle to communicate to to the Internet. So in that point, we will be good to call APIs APIs, to call FTPs, to call whatever we want.
We just need to expose it.
Perfect.
Thank you. Let’s see here.
How would the connector work for SAP having another integration approach like real time or using a remote function call or API?
Okay. So as as the core that we have in the connector in the SAP side, we we we have a wrapper of the of the code that we have developed. So in these cases, if we want to expose it outside of the SAP side, we just need to publish that service to be consumed or just have the the configuration of the security to access to the FTP.
So we don’t have problem using RFCs as I mentioned in the in the in the last in the last point.
Yeah. Also, with the APIs, we have to just work with the with the security team of the company and check how is it going to be exposed.
Awesome. Thank you.
We’ll pause here and see if there’s any more questions.
Okay. Here’s one.
Is this connector approach planned to be extended to other ERP platforms?
Great question. So, earlier I’ll take this at least to start. So earlier, we started out with I started with a couple different frames and patterns Within our data management UI that’s part of the PROS platform, we are building additional connectors.
So for years, we’ve had definitely reusable assets that we’ve used to integrate, and those integrations vary by ERP or by application.
But the next big one we’re working on is, a connector for Microsoft F and O.
So that’s just one flavor. But as you’ll see over time, we’ll have more out of the box productized connectors.
But in the interim, if there’s something that you’re interested in, please reach out because we do have a priority list, that our product management team is managing as far as, the product ties connectors there. But super excited about F and O, to complement what we’ve done with SAP and and others.
Okay. It seems like we’ve kinda reached a quiz point with the questions.
I thank you both for joining me today. Thanks, John. Thanks, Santiago.
And Thank you.
Super happy with the partnership we have with BGSF. So, let us know how we can help.
Definitely. Thank you. Thank thank you very much, Greg, for this time and also for Dan and Andrea, who’s in the back of the scene address That’s right. That’s right. For the platform. Thank you very much. Here.
Yes. So thank you to Andrea and Indiana, for helping us. And, thank you all for attending.
Don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re here to help. Thank you all. Thank you. Have a good day. Bye for now. Bye.
Thank you.