Salesforce SAP Integration For Your Business Transformation

Table of Contents

Introduction

Worldwide organizations use ERP tools to have centralized access to the data dispersed across the department. When we speak about ERP, one name that instantly comes to mind is SAP. With over 24% market share, SAP is a leader in the ERP market.

If SAP had been the ERP leader, Salesforce would dominate the CRM domain for nine years and have a 22.9% market share in 2022.

Now, consider what happens when we integrate a world-class ERP with an equally reputed CRM. Well! by bringing these two together, organizations have a chance to optimize workflow according to customers’ needs.

Integrating SAP with Salesforce is a way to scale up functionalities and enjoy improved workflow at every level. In this post, we will learn about the nitty-gritty of Salesforce SAP integration and why businesses must go for it.

Why Do Businesses Need SAP Salesforce Integration

Running a business was always challenging. Moreover, the rapidly evolving customer needs, market demands, and competition gives hard time to companies and organizations. Modern enterprises need focus, technology, and vision to keep hold of customer requirements. If they focus on customer-centric business strategies and evolve workflow accordingly, they will eventually succeed in offering a delightful customer experience. But is it possible?

One possible solution is to integrate ERP and CRM so that every workflow involved with customer data can be streamlined, synced, and utilized better. With Salesforce SAP integration, businesses can access customer data at every step and every stage of the consumer’s buying journey.

Top Five Reasons for Salesforce SAP integration

By integrating Salesforce with SAP, businesses can enhance efficiency and functionality and enjoy actionable insights. A comprehensive integration policy to unify Salesforce and SAP helps achieve remarkable coordination between departments like sales, marketing, accounting, manufacturing, distribution, inventory, and consumer support. Consequently, a business succeeds in delivering an excellent customer experience, thereby increasing brand loyalty.

To delve into detail, here are the top five reasons you need to integrate Salesforce with SAP,

Unmatched quote accuracy

With Salesforce SAP integration, organizations can easily manage customer expectations while creating quotes and can increase the acceptance chance.

For example, imagine your team is creating a quotation for an XYZ client who has already availed of your services. The CRM will have details of a past project, the total budget, the timeline proposed, and other crucial factors for closing a deal.

When ERP and CRM are integrated, the team can access past order details while creating quotations and accordingly create a more personalized, engaging, and responsive quote.

Sync accounts receivable with CRM

Having an updated and well-integrated accounting workflow is a must for any organization willing to go far and succeed. Pending invoices, negative cash flow, and poor visibility to accounts receivable are some of the concerns that organizations have to address immediately and accurately. However, the lack of accounting data across the team is a huge hindrance.

When a CRM is integrated with an ERP, it becomes easy to fix not only account receivable issues but many more similar issues. Converting such cases becomes seamless, with seamless coordination between finance and accounting departments. Besides, you can automate time-consuming and error-prone workflows and optimize and monitor the cash flow cycle with data-backed facts.

Overcome service installation and warranty issues

When SAP and Salesforce work together, it’s easy for an organization to incorporate product/service installation/warranty information into the workflow. It saves them from providing incompetent solutions to their consumers due to a lack of relevant installation/warranty information.

Your customer support team gets easy access to customer data. They can find all customer information and their association with the company in a single window. Thorough knowledge of customers results in offering excellent customer service, strengthening customer relationships, and providing factful information.

Quick promotion and discounts application

This integration allows businesses to sync discounts and promotions with the workflow and strengthen the distribution process. The team doesn’t have to make efforts to apply applicable discounts, as they are automatically applied.

The CRM and ERP work in sync to access customer information, find promotional offers, enhance customer loyalty, and build better relationships that lifetime.

Easy customer acquisition and onboarding

Customer acquisition becomes much easier with Salesforce SAP integration. It gives you access to everything needed to acquire and onboard a new customer. It offers all customer data in one place and personalizes your marketing campaigns accordingly. The CRM team can find out about past purchases and grievances. With personalized recommendations, it’s easy for businesses to lure customers.

In general, customer onboarding takes a few days, with multiple follow-ups. But, by integrating Salesforce and SAP, businesses can trim down the onboarding efforts and time as all the records are in sync and easily accessible. Records are quickly updated, and the required information is made immediately accessible.

SAP and Salesforce; together, enable businesses to improve customer service, team communication, and internal workflow with the same ease and perfection. However, these benefits are subjective and only possible when the integration between Salesforce and SAP is seamless.

Integrate SAP with Salesforce and enjoy the added functionality, flexibility, and productivity.
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Benefits of Salesforce and SAP Integration

Although integrating Salesforce with SAP is complicated, you must consider it. It offers multiple benefits to a business. Some of the most prominent and substantial benefits of SAP Salesforce integration are:

• Seamless and effective data management as data across the team and departments are easily accessible from a single interface. Teams don’t have to move back and forth to access reliable and valuable data. All the necessary data is made centrally accessible, ensuring scalability and effectiveness in achieving great business intelligence across the operations.
• Improved customer handling, as no customer solution is delivered without relevant data. As data now power mere order tracking, every piece of information, including shipping details, tracking links, and other relevant information plays a significant role in offering a powerful customer experience. It allows for streamlining the buyer journey and delights customers at every stage.
• Reduced overheads as most tasks are automated, and less workforce is needed. The team also spends less time scheduling workflow and follow-ups and can make crucial decisions immediately.
• Personalized service delivery as the team remains in touch with historical customer data and can quickly overview the customer journey as a whole. The concerned team will have required customer data during marketing and sales pinches. This way, the customer turnout is high, and customer loyalty is easy to build.

Challenges in Salesforce SAP Integration

While integrating SAP and Salesforce brings a lot to the table, the process is more challenging than it sounds. How could it be? You are trying to get two superpowers together. The integration becomes more tedious because businesses have to bring on-premise and cloud-based tools together – this is a huge struggle.

Here are some of the significant challenges you might come across while trying to integrate Salesforce with SAP,

• SAP, being an on-premise tool, has different technical specifications. On the other hand, Salesforce is a cloud technology with a completely different set of technical and technological specifications. Their stand-alone nature differences make them hard to handle.
• SAP is a back-end tool that existed way before Salesforce or cloud technology was introduced. Hence, it’s not built for the cloud by default. Even though recent versions are compatible with the cloud, it’s not a cloud tool from a fundamental aspect.
• Salesforce, on the other hand, is a front-end tool built over the cloud. These two are different tools constructed on various platforms and serve different purposes.
• Organizations seek modern Salesforce SAP integration approaches as traditional approaches need to be updated. Direct or point-to-point integration is viable in many cases. But, this approach leads to strict dependencies, resulting in a highly brittle ecosystem and complex architecture. Adding new features and capabilities in such architecture takes time and effort.
• Another very famous approach, to integrating them, is SOA stacks. This approach is significant if you want flexibility in the integration process. But the approach comes with challenges that include high overheads and extensive operations. A full SOA stack can consume a considerable chunk of your business capital and even take years to function fully.
• Both these challenges are something that you can take into account. They are notorious and can jeopardize your SAP Salesforce integration plan.
• Safe and secured data migration is another challenge businesses face during Salesforce SAP integration. The process is so daunting that organizations need help for months. They have to clean, validate, and process the data to prevent migrating unnecessary data. They have to enforce the best data safety measures and compliance standards to make every essential data available for migration.
• The ideal practice to enjoy seamless integration of these two tools is to map out the process in advance to achieve end-to-end connectivity. Cloud-based integration is less tedious and hassle-free. You need to take the help of professional Salesforce support to avoid these challenges and make the most of your Salesforce SAP integration.

Design Solution In Cloud Integration

Ideally, the cloud is the only place where Salesforce and SAP should be merged, as this environment is flexible and easy to expand. In cloud-based Salesforce and SAP integration, the process starts with Postman, which shares HTTPS requests with SAP to initiate the integration. That is the first step of integration.

In the second stage, Salesforce is set up in a way that it handles the request from the above process. The second integration stage starts with converting JSON to XML conversion, storing External ID and message, fetching account ID using Salesforce, setting body, mapping to Case subject, and sending data to Salesforce and XML to JSON converter.

Step-by-step Process For Salesforce SAP Integration

The process of integrating SAP with Salesforce needs to be simplified and involves multiple steps. However, we present you a quick overview of the steps involved so that you can have an idea of what SAP and Salesforce integration might look like:

• Start the integration process by logging into your existing Salesforce account.
• Access Setup and look for API. You can also type API in the Quick Find box if you’re not able to find the API
• You need to have a WSDL file to use the API. Hence, download it.
• Once WSDL is successfully downloaded, use it to generate SOAP projects.
• Generate WSDL/XSD. To make it happen, you must create an upset request via SOAPui. Simultaneously, it would help if you started XSD for the corresponding request. You can use external tools for this task.
• Generate the ESR object using the external definitions that you created in the above steps
• Create SOA requests to map the messages
• Set up or access an API lookup code that can access the session ID and server URL.
• You will also need an ID configuration (get it by creating 2 ICOs using the ECC and forwarding them to Salesforce.

That’s it! With these steps, one can manage to bring SAP and Salesforce together. However, we presented just a quick overview of the steps involved. These steps are a little bit elaborated in real-time. Only reliable Salesforce integration services provider knows the detailed process of Salesforce SAP integration.

Cost of Salesforce SAP Integration

Cost is a crucial factor to consider as one plan for Salesforce SAP integration. Generally, the expenses involved in the force are on the upper side as ownership, licensing, implementations, and optimization of two products are involved. There is no fixed cost to states, as multiple factors influence the final cost.

The best way to find the cost involved is to consult with an experienced Salesforce integration partner that will guide you about the cost involved.

Conclusion

Businesses must find a way to bring together viable tools and technologies, to achieve incomparable sustainability, flexibility, and productivity. SAP and Salesforce are tools that add a lot of value and worth to a business after a successful merger.

However, the job is very tough as both are based on different infrastructures and have other purposes. The ideal way to eliminate the challenges involved and enjoy the copious benefits is to hire a skilled and reputed company offering Salesforce integration services that will allow businesses to ensure Salesforce SAP integration in a fully optimized and scalable way.

Integrate your line-of-business applications today for a better tomorrow.