Are you an SAP manufacturer who is looking for a SAP – Magento integration? If your answer is yes, then continue reading how SAP and Magento can tie together to streamline your business processes. Magento is making a big push into the B2B eCommerce world. The 2.2 B2B Module, expected to launch later this year, expands Magento’s built-in functionality to meet the complex needs of B2B companies. But what about manufacturers who run SAP? Is Magento a good fit? Absolutely! In fact, a tight integration between Magento and SAP is the most affordable, functional, and low-maintenance eCommerce solution you can choose.
The trick is getting the SAP – Magento integration right. If Magento and SAP aren’t sharing data, you’re looking at high ongoing maintenance costs. The good news is that companies like Corevist and Shero work together to provide a seamless, real-time Magento – SAP integration via web services (Corevist) and a stellar Magento storefront (Shero). SAP is still the system of record, and web services carry the appropriate SAP data to the web, where it is displayed in Magento for a great user experience.
But what exactly does this mean? How can an SAP – Magento integration serve your eCommerce needs? Let’s look at the 7 reasons where an SAP – Magento integration nails it for SAP manufacturers.
HINT: #1 is the big one. If you read nothing else, read #1 now .
7. 90 Day Implementation Windows
Yes—it really is possible! Hybris may take 9-18 months to implement, but Corevist does Magento integrations to SAP in a fraction of that time. How? By building only the functionality you need, and by slashing consulting waste.
6. Full Control of Branding and Rich Content
If you work in Marketing, you’ll love Magento. It offers full design flexibility, SEO, the ability to manage and schedule content from your internal team, and it’s built to provide rich content to your customers. As more and more Millennials take jobs as professional buyers and procurement managers, rich content will become more and more crucial to closing the sale for younger generations. Since this trend is in its early stages, it’s best to buy in now to stay ahead of the competition.
5. Real Time SAP Data Displayed with the Magento Storefront
If you work in IT, you know how important it is to maintain the integrity of your SAP data. Some SAP eCommerce solutions depend on a totally isolated eCommerce store (whether Magento or some other platform). To put it bluntly, this is a terrible idea—it builds all kinds of overhead into the project. Which system is the boss—SAP or Magento? Who will sync transaction data between the two, and how?
When you engage a solution like Corevist, we solve all these problems with a logical architecture.
- SAP is “the boss”—the system of record.
- There is no manual duplication of SAP data in Magento.
- Web services provide SAP data for inventory levels, credit checks, contract pricing, and much more. This data lives in SAP and is displayed in Magento in real time.
4. Order Simulation and Posting in SAP + Display of All SAP Warnings and Messages
After a customer builds an order in the Magento storefront and proceeds to checkout, the Corevist solution simulates the order in real-time against your SAP system. This fully automated step can ensure several things, depending on your business needs:
- The customer is in the right sales area to order an item.
- The customer has contractual permission to order an item.
- Inventory has not been depleted in the time since the customer added the item to the cart.
- The customer has ordered a valid quantity for an item that only ships in batches of 10, 20, etc.
- The customer’s credit account is in good standing.
- And much more.
If any of the conditions which you require for order placement are not met, the Magento storefront will display the error messages in real time from your SAP system. The eCommerce store will not allow the customer to place the order until the issues are addressed. This ensures that the Magento store posts only 100% error-free orders to SAP. No more next-morning headaches for your Customer Service reps as they sort out order errors from the previous day’s batch upload.
3. Magento Users are Mapped to SAP Sold-tos
It’s critical to map each Magento user to an SAP sold-to. This relationship should always be 1:1. The Corevist solution allows an Admin to assign a Magento user to a valid SAP sold-to. Because the Magento store reads SAP data in real time, it’s impossible to map a Magento user to an invalid sold-to in SAP. This is just one more way that we put real time data to work for you.
2. No Internal IT Resources Needed for eCommerce Maintenance
Believe it or not, fully 1/3 of Corevist’s clients have no dedicated IT resources maintaining their eCommerce stores. That’s because the architecture of our integration is so lean and efficient. That architecture allows us to slash the total cost of ownership for an SAP eCommerce solution.
1. Each Department Can Focus on Their Strengths
The # 1 reason that our SAP integration approach nails it: We enable each department in the corporation to play to their strengths. No one has to cross over into places where they don’t belong.
Every benefit we’ve already mentioned supports this one, all-encompassing benefit. But what does that mean organizationally?
Marketing needs full control of everything related to branding and the user’s journey to learn about product. SAP IT should worry about all of the business rules required to run the business–permissions, prices, payments, fulfillment, and so on. Marketing shouldn’t be slowed down by IT. They shouldn’t have to become SAP IT. And…heaven forbid that SAP IT be forced to do Marketing’s job!
Marketing and IT don’t always get along. By taking advantage of each of their strengths and isolating them from each other’s weaknesses, the Corevist solution helps them work together in perfect synergy on every SAP B2B eCommerce project.
That’s absolutely huge.
SAP – Magento Integration Final Thoughts
As Magento pushes further into the B2B market, Corevist and Shero are proud to extend this solution to manufacturers running SAP. We believe in building the exact eCommerce solution you need, we’ll do it at a fraction of the cost of Hybris and we’ll get it up and running 3-6x faster too. All these reasons and more make Magento a phenomenal platform for SAP B2B manufacturers.
If you’re looking to implement lean, powerful eCommerce that’s fully integrated with your SAP system, get in touch. Let’s start talking about your business needs.
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George Anderson is the Communications Manager at Corevist, which is based in Raleigh, NC. Corevist is SAP certified and an official Magento Technology Partner. Corevist is revolutionizing SAP B2B eCommerce with Magento integrations to SAP. In 2017, Corevist was named an Inc. 5000 company for the second year in a row.
