A real-time integration to SAP simplifies order management solutions.
When It Comes To SAP Order Management, Every Company Has Its Own Unique Workflow And Ordering Rules.
If you’re enforcing those rules manually, relying on tribal knowledge among your employees, there’s a better way.
Why not translate that human knowledge into your B2B eCommerce system in a way that automates SAP order management and honors your custom business logic?
Let’s talk about SAP order management for B2B.
PARI Respiratory Equipment develops and manufactures products that continually advance the science of respiratory care. This 106-year-old company has headquarters in Germany and territories in the US, Japan, China, Russia, and the UK.
Recently, PARI partnered with us to develop and launch PariOrder.com — a B2B eCommerce website that features real-time integration between Magento and SAP, including SAP order management.
But, before we could launch an SAP-integrated site, we had to address a few SAP issues first, including:
- Some ‘tribal knowledge’ within PARI’s customer service group was not programmed into SAP. (‘Tribal knowledge’ describes business processes and rules followed by seasoned employees, but not documented anywhere.)
- Certain pharmaceutical terminology that PARI’s customers would expect to see on a B2B website didn’t match the existing labels used in SAP.
Our ecommerce & B2B order management solution needed to work with the following:
- Website interface design, provided by PARI’s marketing team
- SAP ECC 6.0
- Magento Community Edition
PARI’s customers wanted an easy-to-use interface that displayed product items and information using the language and terms they recognized.
PARI’s management wanted to make sure that all existing ordering rules were enforced in the new B2B eCommerce site, including SAP order management.
According to Dale Anderson, PARI’s CFO, “Our experienced customer service reps knew about certain maximum order quantity rules that didn’t exist in our SAP system. So, we were concerned that when we switched to an eCommerce site for B2B order management, those safeguards against order entry errors would be lost.”
“For example, if a customer using our new site intended to order 100 products, but entered 1,000 by mistake, we were concerned that the mistake would go directly through to our warehouse and get shipped.”
Translated tribal knowledge into custom SAP logic
We develop a custom table in SAP and implemented logic that can either apply to an individual material number or a product hierarchy. This new logic determines the maximum quantity allowed for a particular order and prevents web users from placing orders in quantities or combinations that violate PARI’s business rules.
Used language and terms that resonate with the target audience.
Instead of showing users a field label called “Material Number – which is an SAP naming convention – we renamed the field “Part Number” because that’s what PARI users would expect to see. This is one small example of a long list of naming and labeling updates we made to create a more user-friendly interface in PARI’s B2B order management solution.
- A confident and reassured management team (they know that their customers are protected from costly order-entry mistakes).
- Happy customers (they can now self-serve routine B2B order management tasks, and they didn’t have to learn a new language!)
- Happy web designers (they got the user interface design they wanted with the data they needed…and they didn’t have to figure out how to connect to SAP)