Build a Connected Supply Chain by Unlocking SAP

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Description

As manufacturing organizations grow in complexity, so does the need for complete visibility into an integrated supply chain. Rather than relying on creating complex integrations that can be inefficient, organizations can leverage reusable APIs to expose data from business-critical systems like SAP. Leveraging reusable APIs across the supply chain helps improve the customer experience and allows users to make better-informed decisions in real-time.

In this demo, you will learn how to unlock your data from SAP with MuleSoft using reusable APIs. We will show the power of MuleSoft with three specific use cases within Supply Chain.

Speaker 1 (00:07):
So before we jumped in the demo, I'd like to set the stage in terms of what you'll be seeing as we navigate through a small slice of the supply chain and see how MuleSoft can help unlock critical data to improve the customer experience and allow users to make better-informed decisions. We'll start with a persona of an Enterprise Architect at a fictional company called Badger Manufacturing and see how Max Mason and his team will unlock data from SAP with reusable APIs instead of creating complex integrations, his team is exposing data from business critical systems that can be reused anywhere in the supply chain. Lauren Bailey, a customer of Badger, will be the first to see the benefits of Max's work. When she logs into Commerce Cloud, she sees real-time order data from SAP on a personalized page. And when she submits a new order, that data is immediately sent back to SAP using the APIs that max and his team has created once that order has been submitted, Sydney central, the sales manager from Badger, will be notified in Slack in real-time. She'll be presented with data around the customer in the order, and you can easily drill into a link that will take her to Manufacturing Cloud to see more information about the order in the supply chain. Lastly, the data that Max and his team has unlocked from SAP can be used to update CR analytics with product data. Cindy can use this information to analyze product forecasts across distributors. So now that you guys have seen kind of what we're gonna be walking through, let's go ahead and switch over to the demo.


(01:35):
So let's start off with Max Mason, the enterprise architect from Badger and what he and his team are tasked with is exposing data from various systems into the supply chain instead of having to build complex integrations between different systems he's going to actually expose this data with reusable APIs and services that can be tied in throughout the Badgers ecosystem. So if we look at one of the most common services or systems out there within manufacturing SAP, this is a view into an account record with an SAP. So this is Ohana incorporated. Coming over to MuleSoft I've logged in and into Badger manufacturing's organizational account, and we're gonna drill into Exchange first. And what Exchange is, is sort of the Apple app store of APIs and services that Max and his team has created to be leveraged throughout Badger's IT ecosystem.


(02:33):
In here, MuleSoft provides a set of pre-built connectors, templates, and APIs that can be reused for various projects to speed up delivery. We have connectors for SAP. We have connectors for Oracle. We have connectors for Salesforce. If you go ahead and search for SAP here, one of the key benefits for manufacturing are what we call Accelerators. We have Accelerators for SAP. We have Accelerators for Manufacturing, but these are pre-built templates that provide solutions for common use cases like SAP and Salesforce integration, quote to cash, procure to pay, and B2B. What this allows his teams to do is get up and running quickly by, you know, downloading this into the design tool, making configuration changes to authenticate into those various systems and then deploying them and having them up and running and exposing that data instantaneously. So if we go back to the asset list here say, for example, we want to actually have an API for SAP accounts, and then we can go ahead and also filter by Rest APIs. We can see one that Max's team put together called SAP ECC Account System API.


(03:44):
So if we pull up that specific API in Exchange here, you can see that through the tooling, we provide a way for Max to document what this API provides, and it's also interactive. So you can come in here and actually click on account by ID, get and similar to what we saw earlier with an SAP, users can now actually see what the API's gonna provide in real-time from that specific backend system. Of course this would be a sandbox instance, so we will go ahead and type in an account ID. Once we put that account record in there, you can see that in Ohana corporate comes up, and it's exposed as an API. So instead of a user having to know how to work with SAP, they can easily call an API and pull that data in real-time from SAP.


(04:40):
Okay. So now that we've seen what max and his team has done with Neilsoft and exposing data from SAP, let's switch over to a different persona. We're gonna switch over to Lauren Bailey. She's a customer of Badger. She's an equipment manager and what she can do once she logs into the e-commerce site is she can actually see a list of her orders. That's pulling data directly from SAP. So we'll click on orders, and we'd see here, the list of orders being pulled directly from SAP. Additionally, we can go through the process of reordering products from the Badger manufacturing site. We're gonna go and click on reorder. Let's go ahead and click on view cart. We're gonna go ahead and proceed to checkout here. We're gonna go ahead and select the ship to the delivery method. We'll do four hours. Let's go ahead and select purchase order and just type in a random set of numbers here and click on next. We'll let this process. The order is complete and you can see up here in the top right we receive a message in Slack.


(05:46):
So jumping back into the journey slide, what we can see here is that max and his team have been able to expose data from SAP in real-time to help Lauren get a better sense of what her order, the status of her order is. and additionally also interact directly with the SAP system through the APIs that his team has created leveraging MuleSoft. Okay. So let's switch over to the last persona. we're gonna talk about Cindy Central, the sales manager for Badger and see how she benefits from the work that Max's team did by exposing data directly from SAP using reusable APIs. So we'll switch over to Slack now and see the message that we just received.


(06:23):
So this is Cindy's view within Slack. This is the order that Lauren just placed from the commerce site, and this is information that's being pulled directly from Commerce Cloud, as well as SAP to give Cindy additional information around the order. From here, what Cindy can do is she can either open the customer record and drill into Lauren's record, or she can also click on open order and open that up within Manufacturing Cloud. Once she clicks on that, you can see that within Manufacturing Cloud, she's able to see additional information about the order. She can go ahead and click on the related tab here and see the specific products that Lauren just ordered. You can see the oil filter as well as the shipping charge. Clicking back on details, we can actually drill into the account record as well.


(07:06):
So once we click on Ohana Incorporated, this is gonna bring us to the Ohana Incorporated record and we can see the orders being pulled in real-time from SAP here, within this section under orders, SAP ECC. The last thing that Sydney central benefits from in terms of Max Mason and his IT team's work around exposing data from SAP is the ability to pull that data from SAP directly into CRM analytics. Information about the products can we use in alongside data from Commerce Cloud to give Cindy a way to make better informed decisions around sales with customers as well as insight into how certain products are performing over time.


(07:51):
So let's go ahead and recap by jumping back into the journey slide and look at, you know, what we've walked through today. So through this approach, what Max Mason and his team is able to do is extend visibility into an integrated supply chain using MuleSoft. This is only a small slice of the supply chain that we're seeing here today and we're only looking at one specific system, SAP, in general. What MuleSoft will allow Max and his team to do is wrap other systems of record and expose that data through various areas of the supply chain, not just this customer experience but also partners, distributors factory floor information that's helpful to allow key stakeholders a way to make better-informed decisions based off data that's being pulled from, you know, other systems across the supply chain.

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