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Month: November 2022

Best practices to integrate Salesforce and SAP

Posted on by siteowner

The integration between Salesforce and SAP will help achieve better brand value and profits for any organization. Successful integration of these two powerful enterprise platforms creates the potential to strike an equilibrium between business operations and customer relations, which is integral for the success of any product a company launches.

Salesforce is a leading cloud-based customer relationship management platform that provides customized applications and software solutions for sales, service, marketing and analytics. It unites multiple functions of an organization from anywhere with Customer 360, a Salesforce-integrated CRM platform, that powers the entire suite of connected apps.

On the other hand, SAP stands for systems, applications and products in data processing. It is a leading producer of software used for the management of business processes, developing solutions that facilitate effective data processing and information flow across organizations. SAP assists enterprise software to manage both their business operations and customer relations.

A Salesforce SAP integration brings in the possibility of better customer service and enhances business profits. The integration helps organizations across industries, irrespective of its size, run their businesses profitably, adapt continuously and grow sustainably.

Businesses that undergo the Salesforce SAP integration have a unique advantage in managing and tracking customer relationships. While Salesforce manages front-end information about its customers, SAP manages back-end tasks. Organizations that integrate the two, benefit from additional business functions through enhanced productivity and value-added insights. This, in turn, improves customer interaction and experience.

Benefits of Salesforce SAP Integration

Organizations can gain numerous advantages by leveraging the integration of Salesforce and SAP. Some of the benefits that this integration provides, include:

  • Effective data management with business intelligence capabilities
  • Improved invoice creation
  • Real-time error management with troubleshooting services
  • Processing of orders in real-time for optimal outcomes
  • Accelerated cash flow, thereby maximizing return on investment (ROI)

The Salesforce and SAP integration is crucial to bring in a 360-degree view of customer data, which enables a seamless customer journey. However, despite its prevalence, getting the integration right is a challenge that many organizations face. The implementation of the integration might not be very straightforward as both, Salesforce and SAP, are complex solutions built to be proprietary and standalone offerings. Neither of the platforms is designed to work with other software, and here’s why.

SAP is built as a back-end solution and many of its offerings were created much before the age of cloud computing. On the other hand, Salesforce is a cloud pioneer and created for front-end use. Therefore, a seamless integration requires a planned approach to account for the technological differences between SAP’s on-premises solutions and Salesforce’s cloud-based solutions.

When an organization plans for Salesforce and SAP integration, mapping out its process in advance will be the best place to start. Approaching the integration through the lens of a process rather than a simple data mapping or end-to-end connectivity will make the business more scalable and efficient. The rapid adoption of cloud technology is impacting how enterprise application support is developed and implemented to assist in the same.

Challenges of integrating Salesforce and SAP

Although the Salesforce SAP integration could translate into multiple benefits for organizations, its implementation could come with its own set of limitations and challenges. Any successful integration requires the right approach and the right set of enabling technologies. Apart from the core approach, other technical issues could include adapters and interfaces, communications, semantic mediation, format conversion and security.

Below are some of the most common challenges encountered during the integration:

  • Technical disparities as SAP is an on-premise software whereas Salesforce is a cloud solution
  • Difficulty in synchronizing data from SAP to Salesforce
  • Salesforce users generate quotes using products and price book information that need to be linked with corresponding opportunities in SAP. Whereas, product and pricing information in SAP needs to be synchronized with Salesforce.
  • The need to process data in Salesforce before reaching the order and execution phase in SAP also needs to be considered.
  • Relevant data such as related order history and current financial status need to be accessible in real-time for the Salesforce user.

The idea is to leverage the best approach that is consistent with the organization’s integration requirements. Of course, there are several options to achieve optimal integration according to those requirements. The importance of managed IT infrastructure grows manifold during such important operations, a point that every organization must take note of.

Design solution in cloud integration

Below is a graphical representation of the technical workflow, showing the different steps involved during the integration of Salesforce and SAP.

salesforce-sap-integration

Step-by-step process of SAP and Salesforce integration

The main steps for integration of SAP and Salesforce are as below:

  • Log in to the Salesforce development account
  • Go to the setup option and type API in the Quick Find box
  • Download the required WSDL file
  • Use the Salesforce WSDL to create the required SOAP project
  • Create WSDL/XSD with the help of the following steps
  • Create an upsert request using SOAPui
  • Subsequently, create XSD for that request using external tools
  • By importing the external definition, that was created in the previous step, create another ESR object
  • Message map by creating SOAP requests
  • Next, an API lookup code is needed for the session ID and server URL
  • Thereafter an ID configuration is needed
  • In order to do that, first create 2 ICOs by getting data from ECC and then sending it to Salesforce

Conclusion

As one of the most widely used enterprise resource planning solutions in the market, SAP plays a key role in the most critical aspects of business processes for many companies. To fully automate and optimize these business processes, companies need to integrate SAP with other applications within their organization. Integrating Salesforce and SAP is an essential step since there is a central need to bring these frameworks together to meet the prerequisites of the business.

The individual benefits of both Salesforce and SAP when combined during their integration empower organizations with the ability to turn vital customer data into meaningful and actionable insights. This will allow decision-makers to make crucial business decisions faster, streamline business processes, boost productivity and therefore gain a competitive advantage in the market.

Infovision with its cloud migration expertise and as a managed service provider with its technical staffing services is a trusted partner for achieving Salesforce SAP integration.

Planning Poker: A Proven Technique to Enhance Business Agility

Posted on by siteowner

The famous adage: “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” fits so well in the context of how teams function. The same goes well in the context of an organization. Teams are the building blocks of an organization and have a significant role to play in fostering business agility.

In a team the overall performance of the unit is critical to achieving shared objectives and agility is a big accelerator that helps accomplish this goal. Most of the organizations are adopting agile or scaled agile frameworks in their digital transformation journeys to achieve business agility. As already mentioned, team agility is an essential ingredient if one has to achieve business agility.

In any routine project, given that different teams work on different types of user stories or tasks, a proven practice for planning and estimation that is used by agile teams is the Planning Poker technique. Based on the team requirement this technique can be used in a variety of team settings. This blog focuses on the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of this popular consensus-based estimating approach.

How Does the Planning Poker Technique Work?

The Planning poker technique is used during sprint or iteration planning by the team to estimate the story points for user stories. The Scrum master facilitates this event and the product owner and the team members are the active participants. It uses modified Fibonacci series 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100 to estimate the size of the user story. The modified Fibonacci series has the numbers in increasing order from 0 to n to capture any uncertainty. The set of poker cards is placed in centre of the table. There are multiple cards, i.e. ten cards for number 5, ten cards for number 8 and so on which represents the numbers from the Fibonacci series. When the product owner shares the user story, all the team members go through it and pick one poker card from the table, based on the best number which fits their estimate.  They are not supposed to reveal the estimated number card immediately.  They then place their card upside down on the table. On the instruction of the scrum master all the members then reverse their respective cards at the same time.  The number/estimate that the card reveals is then discussed for variations along with the thought process on why the team member chose the given number. Shared understanding is created through thought-provoking discussions, and the scrum master repeats the planning poker technique until the team members reach suitable consensus on the estimate.

This process of estimation by each team member and the discussions that follow, help the team members understand different aspects involved in the user story. In this way planning poker technique helps in getting a better or accurate estimate for the team backlog and smooth execution of the sprint or iteration. It has been observed that over a period the team members become capable of good estimation and the team is able to handle and accommodate in between additions of the user stories by the product owner. This leads to increase in the confidence of the team members and overall improved functioning of the team. In a way planning poker technique is designed such that it enhances self-organizing characteristics of the team. So, the planning poker technique is used for agile estimations within the team for better and healthier sprint delivery.

Common Challenges

Here’s why it is important to have a consensus-based estimation technique.

  • In most of the teams, a majority of members have familiarity with the waterfall way of working, where complete scope is defined and the team members work on the tasks assigned to them.  In such a scenario they don’t know the scope of overall tasks and how much time it would take to complete the tasks. When the same team members start working in agile teams, the approach is contrary so they face difficulty in estimating and meeting sprint goals.
  • Teams are dynamic.  There is always a situation where some team members leave and new ones join. The scope of work also keeps changing, new additions are uncertain. In Agile teams one should always take the right decision and move forward.
  • Wrong estimates by the scrum master or the product owner or the team leader – the people who usually estimate on behalf of team – can lead to dissatisfaction which in turn impacts delivery.

When is Planning Poker Required?

This technique is very helpful as it brings clarity and helps in faster delivery for teams working in
sprints or iterations. This is true especially when,

  • The scope of the work is new or complex to address the unknowns,
  • The team is consistently not able to meet the sprint goals, 
  • the requirements are changing, and customer priority is changing,
  • when the team is newly formed and starting on execution,
  • when teams are transforming from waterfall to agile,
  • when overall performance of a team needs improvement,
  • when the root cause is problem in estimations.

Driving Scrum Values

Scrum values create strong and resilient teams. Planning Poker drives the following scrum values within the teams.

  • Commitment: By using Planning Poker for estimation, all the team members commit to the sprint goal.
  • Focus: Since the team members discuss about the different aspects of the user stories, the team members are equipped with the required information to start focusing on the task.
  • Openness: The team is encouraged to openly discuss about the user stories. This helps in bringing out the unknowns.
  • Respect:Since all the team members discuss and mutually participate in the estimation it creates a mutual respect for all team members as this is a way of learning and understanding each other.
  • Courage: In a majority of situations, a lot of the team members do not speak and tend to follow the leader blindly. The Planning Poker practice encourages all the team members to participate and be courageous.

Due to the many benefits, agile teams like Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework, Kanban and hybrid agile
teams practice planning poker.

This technique increases the predictability of team sprint goal leading to higher levels of collaboration, performance and team agility. Team agility leads to increased predictability in program level and enhances business agility thus leading to win-win for the team members, organization and customers.