Today, ERP systems such as SAP play an important role in business operations as business buses. However, outside of the ERP system, each enterprise has a unique management process based on its own years of experience in production and operation. To improve efficiency, enterprises often need to build various business applications, but they are often limited by the high cost, long development cycle, difficult integration of heterogeneous systems, and difficult unification of code quality caused by traditional development methods.
Now, with Microsoft's Power Platform low-code platform, developers and business personnel can quickly build intelligent applications for enterprises around ERP business buses like SAP. At the same time, quickly link with ERP systems for data interaction through pre-built or custom connectors.
Since Microsoft officially released a set of new capabilities that support Power Platform integration with SAP in December 2022, every organization running SAP has the ability to more easily digitally transform and automate business processes. These features include:
- Pre-built SAP integration solutions
- Advanced SAP system connectivity support
- Update the on-premises data gateway
- Updated SAP ERP connector
- New Azure Logic Apps functions
Pre-built SAP integration solutions
Pre-built SAP Integration solutions (SAP Integration) integrate with SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA systems through Power Platform. Scenarios include: Power Apps templates, Power Automate flows, and more components and features, detailed below.
1. Pre-build Power Apps
In this pre-built solution, Power Platform provides a suite of Power Apps apps for order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay business processes.
Sales order entry and purchase order entry are two tedious tasks common in the SAP process, and the pages and data properties involved in these two tasks have been successfully simplified to a simple page in Power Apps. In these applications, business users will be able to complete common tasks faster while ensuring data accuracy through the automation of business rules in Power Automate.
Because Power Apps is fully configurable, users can also easily modify these templates to flexibly meet the specific needs of their organization.
The picture shows an example of a purchase order Power App template where users can search, display, create, and change SAP purchase orders
As it expands, pre-built SAP integration solutions will support Power Apps for 25 of the most common SAP business processes, including:
- From order to cash – customer, quote, sales order, delivery, customer invoice, customer payment, and pricing updates at scale
- Procure-to-pay – vendor, purchase requisition, purchase order, goods receipt, vendor invoice, and vendor payment
- From recording to reporting – financial postings, GL accounts, cost centers, profit centers, cash applications and bulk upload journals.
- Make-to-stock/make-to-order (MRP)--Production/processing orders, materials, goods movement, equipment, work orders, and shipments
Here are some examples of existing Power Apps apps:
Example of a pre-built Power Apps app section
2. Pre-build Power Automate
To support the 25 SAP Power Apps apps, their corresponding Power Automate flows will also be pre-built into the SAP integration solution. These processes leverage SAP-published APIs and can run in any organization's SAP environment, regardless of the SAP version used.
The picture shows an example of a pre-built process for approving purchase orders in SAP
These Power Automate flows allow users to:
- Reduce time to value – Business users no longer need to spend time researching and experimenting with APIs. These flows work out of the box and do not need to be installed on the SAP server.
- Reduce technical and administrative burden – By reducing the use of custom code in SAP, business users will be able to upgrade processes more easily and reduce technical barriers and costs.
- Sustainability—SAP released APIs that have been supported for decades. These streams will remain available as long as SAP continues to support its core APIs.
Dozens of Power Automate flows are available to support order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay business processes. This number continues to grow, here are some examples:
Example of a pre-built Power Automate flow section
Advanced SAP system connectivity
Many enterprise organizations require advanced connection parameters to manage user sessions. Previously, customers running SAP often received feedback that certain advanced connection parameters could not be used for user sessions, especially messaging servers that supported load balancing across thousands of users. Enterprise users can now use established set connection parameters to support messaging servers, gateway servers, and more advanced SSO configurations.
SAP Basis administrators can now set SAP systems as data source environment variables during environment setup:
You can then use the new SAP connector to easily reference the SAP system in your flow:
New on-premises data gateway
The on-premises data gateway acts as a bridge to provide secure data transfer between on-premises SAP data and Microsoft cloud services, including Power Platform and Azure Logic Apps. The latest version of the on-premises data gateway handles two SAP integration requirements:
- Backward compatibility – Customers using previous versions of the SAP connector can still run their processes.
- Enhanced SSO—Kerberos delegation now ensures that SSO is a seamless experience between Power Apps, Power Automate, and SAP.
New SAP connector
In the past, there was a known issue in Power Automate where when selecting a complex API from SAP, parameters would not render after retrieving the schema. Once the schema is retrieved, it is difficult to use any SAP API. The new SAP connectors and actions in Power Automate now implement the following improvements:
- Flow creators are able to select an advanced SAP system connection from the drop-down list without knowing any system details (for example, IP address, client ID, system number).
- When the SAP API is selected, it returns only required parameters and allows the flow creator to specify other optional parameters as needed.
- Hide SSO and Data Gateway parameters in advanced system connections to reduce the number of data elements required in operations.
The picture shows an illustration of using the new SAP connector
In the future, Microsoft will further simplify this experience based on feedback from people using complex SAP APIs.
New Azure Logic Apps functions
Power Automate's expression language is based on logic app functions. To work with SAP data more efficiently, new functions have been added:
- isInt: Returns true if the data property is an integer. This allows the flow maker to determine whether leading zeros should be added to the SAP data before being sent to the SAP API, or remove leading zeros from the SAP data after retrieving records from SAP.
- chunk: Splits text areas, long strings, or file contents into arrays of fixed-length strings from the SAP API.
- sort: Sorts the array of objects by the key found in each object.
- reverse: Reverse sorts the array of objects by the key found in each object.
- dateDifference: Determines the difference between two dates and returns it in the time unit specified in the function. This is especially useful for customers who use time-based billing.
- isFloat: There is a unique edge case where some SAP APIs return currency strings in the user's localized format, which creates problems for mathematical operations. This function is used in conjunction with float() to remove formatting so that mathematical operations are performed correctly.
- parseDateTime: Converts the string representation of a timestamp to the standard ISO 8601 format. The output of this function can reliably be used to perform other operations on timestamps, just like functions defined in date and time functions.
- formatDateTime: A new optional parameter locale has been added to the existing formatDateTime. If not specified, the default locale is used.
- nthIndexOf: Allows the nth occurrence of the substring to be found.
- slice: Provides a new method for extracting substrings. Existing function substrings already allow such functionality by providing a starting index and length.
The following is an example of a Power Automate flow that checks whether the SAP item ID is numeric or alphanumeric. If it is a number, the expression formats the SAP material ID with leading zeros required by the SAP API:
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