If you just purchased SAP PI/PO there is a lot of things to consider. This post will help you in the process of figuring out what is interesting.
The thing is you don’t know too much but it will have the greatest impact on what is set up. So it would be a good idea to have an architecture workshop where you will get all the insight into how you can create a solution that matches what you want to achieve. So it is an ideal time to get help.
I have created a mindmap video where I cover some of the most important things about the process. Watch the video below.
Architecture
A big thing is to get the architecture to match what you want in your organization. There are a lot of things to consider like naming conventions and how to create interfaces. You should hopefully get a few sample interfaces that show how the things would look and how to monitor them. You should also consider how to make documents required for it both mapping documents if required and documentation.
It may be a good idea to have a secondary consultant to help you in the process that is on your side because you don’t know as much about what you can expect.
Watch on YouTube New SAP PI PO customer. What to lookout for
Testing
Testing is one of the important things in the process. If you “just” replace middleware, you have the ability to get input and output documents. If you use the Figaf DevOps Suite for SAP PI/PO testing then you will be able to perform the tests to verify that messages look identical. This way you can save some time for testing the application together with business experts.
If you are doing a greenfield implementation of SAP S/4 ERP then you will have to change the interfaces on both sides. You will still have to setup testing so you can ensure that the process works correctly even when you have to apply support packs.
Migration
A good place to start is also my migration guide. It is much the same things, except that you have more free hands with what you want to do and the changes that you must make.
There are some of the things here that can be applied to the list of attributes to collect from each interface. You can find it in the slides. If you can get the information it may be a lot easier for a partner to do a good estimation of the project. You may add data like a number of fields in each interface to give better information about required mapping size maybe group it into buckets like 1-20, 20-100, 100+ fields that need to be mapped.
Read: 7 steps to an SAP PI to PO migration
Cloud world
In this blog, we have not been covering any of the SAP platforms that may be interesting and save some time on integration. There is SAP Integration Suite with Cloud Integration (CPI, formerly HCI), which is a solution quite similar to PI but cloud-based and more flexible. It contains a lot of prebuilt content that will speed up an integration, so it may be used in some scenarios. You may also be able to run this type of interfaces on your new SAP PO system. For some integrations, it may be beneficial to use because of the flexibility and the availability of adapters.
Other advice
I asked the question what people would like to have known before they started on the SAP PI/PO project a long time ago and I did get some interesting answers that may be quite in line with what you are looking for. There was a lot of ideas about making better guides for what should be implemented. You can read all suggestions here.
Good luck on your new platform. I promise it will be an adventure.
