Is your company managing SAP EDI integration effectively? As you scale your business and expand your list of trading partners, you’ll need to communicate through electronic document exchange (EDI).

According to Digital Commerce 360’s 2022 B2B Ecommerce Marketing report, that’s the case for 76.5% of online B2B sales. Working with national retailers and big box stores can be an enormous boon for your business, but the required EDI compliance can be costly and complicated to implement.

Regardless of the size of your business, you need to be confident in your SAP EDI integration solution to remain competitive in today’s fast-moving, digital climate. Successfully implementing an EDI solution means faster, more accurate communication with your trading partners, vendors, suppliers, and distributors.

The right SAP EDI integration tool can open up new revenue opportunities, improve your business operations, and lay a foundation for future growth.

Automatic Data Exchange Lowers Expenses and IT Needs

To optimize sales and distribution processes like ordering, inventory, shipping, and invoicing, you rely on accurate, two-way, electronic data exchange between your internal business software and your trading partners’ systems.

Automated EDI integration eliminates inefficient manual data entry. Of course, you can create a custom integration, but you’ll need a team of in-house IT experts who can manage software installation, configure documents, handle varying data formats, and keep up with ongoing EDI updates.

In contrast, investing in tightly integrated, cloud-based EDI integration can simplify your IT environment. After initial setup, the platform works behind the scenes, managing the technology without the hassle or extra costs related to software, equipment, or IT manpower. 

Flexible Solutions Offer Unlimited Potential for Growth Without Cost Overruns

Some EDI solutions penalize you with high transaction overage charges when you exceed the contracted allotment due to increased sales.

However, an effective EDI solution will grow with your business and actually reduce per-transaction costs as you expand your product line or increase your sales. That means you can easily scale while keeping your transaction costs down.

When looking for the right solution, look for an EDI integration built just for SAP that can handle any volume, with a sliding scale transaction model that increases or decreases based on sales. Then, even if you don’t work with a particular trading partner for a month, you won’t be on the hook for extra charges.

A Fully-Integrated System Improves Trading Partner and Customer Service Relationships

With a flexible, turnkey EDI integration solution, cloud data integration (CDI) mapping is done for you, ensuring complete coordination between systems. When an integration solution offers a variety of trading partner connectors, they can configure your documents according to the needs of your trading partners and your enterprise resource software. By eliminating manual data entry, you’ll ensure clean data is transferred efficiently and integrated effectively between the two systems.

The system will ensure the necessary data is automatically extracted according to your trading partners’ required standards, whether they use EDIFACT, ANSI X12, or other EDI formats. As a result, you’ll ensure efficiency and accuracy through the entire order process, for both your suppliers and your customers.

With critical information transferred precisely between systems, you’ll improve your company’s decision-making ability and provide excellent customer service with greater inventory and shipping accuracy.

Greater Efficiency Increases Your Bottom Line

By automating your processes, you can reduce duplication and allocate staff to manage different priorities. You’ll improve order-processing speed and eliminate costly errors.

Amazon, for example, issues chargeback fees between 2-6 percent, depending on your level of compliance over the previous six-week period. Lack of EDI integration could result in problems like shipping label errors, ship method mismatches, and inaccurate inventory, resulting in monthly fees that could add up to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for large companies.

With a tightly integrated EDI/ERP solution, instead of manually entering data into multiple systems with a high probability of inaccuracy, you’ll keep more of your hard-earned money and employees can focus on tasks that move your business forward. 

Alluvia is an Experienced SAP Integration Provider with a Proven Track Record

Alluvia provides end-to-end integration and EDI services exclusively for SAP Business One, ByDesign, and S/4HANA, so you’ll gain expert knowledge backed by our revolutionary integration platform. Our scalable solution lays the foundation for growth, providing your business value today and ensuring you’re ready for the future.

You’ve got a strong ecommerce presence and are growing your business at a healthy pace. You’ve also got a CRM system managing your customer data, promotions, and marketing. And you’ve implemented an ERP system to handle your finances and logistics.

It’s perfectly acceptable to run your business using different software for specific needs, and you may be comfortable doing so—but there are a vast number of ways to streamline your business and simplify your processes just by integrating your ecommerce solution with your CRM and ERP systems.

The biggest (but not only) advantage to integrating your ecommerce site with your CRM and ERP systems is that your customers will have an easy and enjoyable shopping experience. A large part of this positive experience is the ability to perform self-service tasks on your ecommerce sites, such as viewing order history or creating a return.

Failing to properly implement self-service can have drastic implications for your business. According to StellaService, “Customer self-service isn’t just a courtesy: it’s an organizational imperative. Over half of shopping carts are abandoned due to hidden or hard-to-find product, price, and/or policy details—costing retailers $4 trillion in sales revenue each year.”

It’s easy to forget that even though your back end systems aren’t visible to customers, they play an extremely important role in the rhythm of your business.

Tackling an integration project such as this will no doubt involve some effort—but the many advantages of integrating your ecommerce, CRM, and ERP systems will be more than worth it in the end. Let’s take a look, one integration at a time, to see what these advantages are.

ERP and Ecommerce Integration

When most people think about ERP systems, they picture behemoth software packages that manage finances, payroll, logistics, and more. There is no question: ERP systems are extremely powerful. But they can also give your business an extra boost when your ERP and ecommerce systems are integrated.

Productivity

ERP and ecommerce integration can enhance productivity by streamlining your product data management. Setting up and managing your products is challenging enough; duplicating this effort across different systems is an unnecessary burden. When your ERP data flows directly into your ecommerce system, all the work put into setting up new products, adding descriptions and images, and attaching pricing models will be incorporated into your site for customers to consume.

On top of that efficiency, you can sell the same products configured in your ERP system across all your selling channels (e.g., online, brick and mortar stores, call centers, and catalogs) effortlessly, by managing it all in a single system.

Finances

Keeping a single system of record for your financial postings is a no-brainer. However, when you’ve got separate systems for your back-end ERP and front-facing ecommerce site, integration can seem like needless task.

But imagine this scenario—a customer places an order on your site for three different items. He wants two of the items sent to his house in Portland, OR. The third item is a gift, and should be sent to his friend in Los Angeles, CA.

Your business model calculates tax on a destination-based taxing schema, so your ecommerce site should calculate zero percent for the items shipping to Oregon and 9.5 percent for the item going to California. At checkout, the customer decides to use a gift card for $20 and puts the remaining payment amount on a credit card.

This scenario might be achieved with a stand-alone ecommerce system, but when the quarter ends and you need to report on your taxes charged—or when you need to reconcile customer payments against accounts receivable statements—you’ll need to extract all this data to create your reports.

If your ERP and ecommerce systems are integrated, tax and payment data can flow easily from one system to another, and reports can be generated in a cinch.

Logistics

Nothing leaves a bad impression like a broken promise. Providing accurate inventory positions and delivery dates to your customers is key to high customer satisfaction. Even better, allowing them to track the progress of their orders online empowers shoppers to control their shopping experience. This is where ERP integration provides a huge advantage.

If you manufacture your own products, you can give realistic expectations to your customers regarding when items will be available, based on calculations your ERP system can perform. Most ERP systems have built-in capable-to-promise (CTP) or available-to-promise (ATP) algorithms that take into account your production and fulfillment time. When your ecommerce and ERP systems are integrated, these dates can be shown to customers on your site to give them more information while shopping.

ERP integration can boost confidence that inventory information displayed on your ecommerce site accurately reflects your warehouse inventory. If your systems are integrated, inventory levels can be automatically increased whenever your warehouse receives a purchase order, or decreased any time shipments are picked up. Better yet, when shipments leave the warehouse, you can notify your customers so they can be excited about receiving your goods.

When your ERP and ecommerce systems are integrated, logistics information is passed back and forth in near real time—providing your customers the best possible information about your goods and their orders.

CRM and Ecommerce Integration

CRM systems have become essential to running a business in the ecommerce space, and they are utilized by nearly every ecommerce business. CRM systems are perfect for capturing contact information for leads, managing customer data, and creating targeted promotions. But CRM systems alone are incomplete. They don’t contain the transactional and financial information that can help managers track customer trends and identify new sales opportunities.

An ecommerce and CRM integration can have a huge, positive impact on your business. It helps you establish a sense of loyalty among your current customers, maximizes your sales, and makes the shopping experience exceptional.

Loyalty

Loyalty programs incentivize existing customers to come back to your ecommerce site, thus strengthening your impact on those customers. A good loyalty program allows customers to accrue points, participate in campaigns, and get rewarded with special promotions and offers. Most CRM systems come with out-of-the-box functionality to create, manage, and monitor loyalty programs. Integrating your ecommerce and CRM systems will make it easy for customers to go online and look up their available rewards and points balances.

Maximizing sales

Another great benefit to sharing your data across ecommerce and CRM systems is the ability to save customer shipping and payment information for convenience at checkout. Taking away any hurdles that stand between a customer putting an item in their cart and checking out is a huge advantage on its own—and making it extra convenient allows customer to check out with ease. With this customer data, you can also implement abandoned cart recovery, maximizing your sales and delivering a personalized shopping experience.

Customer experience

Aside from loyalty scenarios, there are several other situations in which you’d want to display data from your CRM system on your ecommerce site. For example, let’s say a customer received numerous compliments on a new lip color she purchased from your site. She wants to recommend it to her friends, but she can’t remember the name of the shade. If her order history was available online (fetched from the CRM system), she could easily pull up the exact shade to share with her friends.

Another scenario where CRM data is extremely useful on your ecommerce site is when a customer wants to make a return. A 2017 study from UPS found that two-thirds of shoppers surveyed take the time to review a return policy before purchasing. When your CRM and ecommerce systems are integrated, you can make your returns process smooth and simple. Data from CRM can be auto populated in the return form, such as item identifiers and customer email addresses and phone numbers, saving your customers time (and headaches).

When your ecommerce, ERP, and CRM systems are talking to each other, your operations are greatly simplified. And you will benefit from three huge advantages: your data will be synchronized; your business will be able to grow more easily; and you will be providing an exceptional shopping experience for your customers.

Data mapping is the process of assigning a new home for a data element as it moves from one application to another. A seemingly simple example: A sales order comes in from an ecommerce site, such as Amazon, and the “customer name” data element needs to go to the “customer name” box (or field) in your ERP system

So far, so good.

But what if Amazon sends you the customer name data element in the form of two fields: First Name and Last Name? In other words, Bob Smith comes in as “Bob” and “Smith”—two separate fields. And what if your ERP always records customer names in one field, with both the first and last name in a single field (e.g., “Bob Smith”)?

Now you have an integration problem, and you need a way to fix it so that “Bob” and “Smith” ends up combined in one field, as “Bob Smith.”

To further complicate the issue, what if the labels for each field are different? Let’s say you sell via your own website, using a shopping cart application such as Shopify, and you also accept orders from a marketplace site, such as Amazon. Both types of orders need to flow smoothly into your ERP.

But suppose Shopify calls customers “users” and the ecommerce application calls them “buyers”? And, what if your own ERP system refers to them as “business partners”?

Welcome to data mapping spaghetti.

Remember, so far, we have only been talking about one field—the name of the customer. Every document (sales order, order acknowledgement, invoice, packing slip, etc.) has multiple fields, all of which need to flow smoothly from one system to the other. And, for every incoming document there is often a “response document” that must be sent as acknowledgement (confirming the receipt of an order, for example). We have also just been talking about one integration situation.

Our example of customer name transformation is just one of many obstacles you will encounter during your data integration project. For example—imagine your ecommerce site captures addresses with state names spelled out (e.g. “New York”), and your ERP system requires states be stored as two character abbreviations (“NY”).

You can understand why a data integration project typically costs thousands of dollars and months of effort, which we describe briefly below.

The Traditional Solution for Data Mapping

Traditionally, a data integration project takes several months and involves many different parties, including a subject matter expert (or SME) for each of your applications and a specialized consultant who will create custom code and help to manipulate the data when required.

Once you’ve assembled your data mapping team, you can begin the process of mapping fields from system to system. Typically, the steps involved include:

• Identifying which entities (or tables) will be moved over, along with the specific fields

• Distinguishing the format of the data before and after it is transferred

• Deciding what will trigger the transfer (manual or automatic)

• Determining the frequency of the transfer (for integrations)

These steps don’t look too intimidating, but keep in mind that you’ll be repeating them for every document and response—and this process will be multiplied by the number of applications you have.

And even after months have been spent developing a custom data mapping solution, you’re still not done. What happens when your ecommerce application has a system update, and an already-mapped field has changed its format? More development work must be done to remap the field in the appropriate format. And, what if your ERP system has an update?

As software updates are not always in sync, you can see how this would be a never-ending project.

And you’re not the only one who has an integration problem—or the only one looking for simpler solutions. As DataVersity reports, “Approximately 41 percent of business users find data integration technologies complex to use,” often causing more complications and frustration than the actual data mapping integration itself.

Until recently, system integration problems such as these have been ridiculously difficult to solve. Fortunately, there are new, smart tools that automate much of the data mapping process,

An Alternative Approach to Data Integration

Wouldn’t it be nice if data mapping teams documented their approaches and developed a tool to make this simpler? The Alluvia data mapping tool does just that. It allows business managers of any skill level to set up ERP integration systems themselves and easily adapt as situations change or new integration partners are brought into the fold.

To create Alluvia, we identified the most popular ecommerce, shopping cart, CRM, and shipping systems used in the industry today. Then, we created templates for the essential document types (sales order, packing slip, etc.) for each of these platforms.

Alluvia takes these templates and, using an easy mapping wizard, maps each field in a document to their respective homes in SAP Business One. With a few clicks, business managers can map the majority of the fields required to import sales orders to SAP Business One from Magento, ShipStation, Shopify, Salesforce, and more.

Let’s use our same examples from above, of customer name and state, and see how the data mapping would be done using Alluvia. In this example, let’s say you want to map shipping updates from ShipStation to your SAP Business One system.

First, find the sales order template for ShipStation from the catalogue of pre-defined templates.

You can see that Alluvia offers several out-of-the-box integrations to SAP Business One. Once you’ve selected ShipStation, now select the appropriate template for the integration.

Here is where all those months of a using a traditional data mapping solution get boiled down to a matter of minutes. Once you’ve chosen the mapping template, source, and endpoint systems, the Template Wizard will guide you through the field-mapping process starting with what it thinks are the obvious matches. With all the source system fields on the left and target system fields on the right, you can simply drag and drop any additional fields to the mapping. In this case, let’s drag “customerId” into our mapping instance.

Remember, our example integration conflict was that our source system sent the customer name as “Bob” and “Smith”—two separate fields. And our ERP records customer name in a  single field (e.g., “Bob Smith”). To convert the source fields to fit into the destination field, you’ll create a Transformation.

When a set of characters (or string) needs to be combined with another string, a formula called CONCATENATE is often used to do this Transformation. The Template Wizard includes an option to apply custom formulas to fields as necessary. There are many formula types available in the tool, including left trim, right trim, split, default value, and Excel formula. This last option is especially powerful—if you know how to use Excel, you already know how to write Alluvia formulas.

For our example, we’ll use an Excel formula to concatenate “Bob” and “Smith” from ShipStation before mapping it to the customerId field in SAP Business One. And with those few steps, our integration problem with customer name is now resolved.

Alluvia has a list of  “Global Transformations”, which includes some common transformation values that a user can activate and apply to a field. To address our earlier issue of mapping the state field of an address, we can use a transformation type of UnitedStatesCodes to convert our spelled out state names to abbreviations for our SAP Business One to consume.

As you can see, using the Alluvia Template Wizard is like having an expert guide you through the entire process. Using this simple example of mapping the customer name field from one system to another is just the beginning—there are endless other scenarios in which the Alluvia Template Wizard can make a data integration project complete quicker, and without added stress.