B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) 109
on e-commerce exchanges. For example, companies can develop new
products with their suppliers by sharing each other's data across online
marketplaces. Collaborative commerce also enables organizations to
find new partners to solve one-off design problems.
Unlike old-style ERP, ERP II will cut across all business processes,
such as customer relationship management (CRM), as well as traditional
functions including finance and human resource management. ERP II
will also be applicable to all industries, not just the finance, manufacturing
and distribution sectors that were the original focus of ERP.
ERP integration
Before we start discussion about ERP integration, it is of utmost
importance to understand clearly what ERP is not. ERP is not the
nirvana of a company's integration needs — it is just another application
that has to be integrated through EAI. Secondly, no ERP will provide
all functionalities to support every business aspect of a company —
thus there will always be multiple applications apart from ERP. There
will be a need for an adapter or interface to communicate between ERP
and other applications.
ERP integration can be done in multiple ways, such as developing
in-house connector components, using the APIs provided by the ERP
vendors, configuring third party adapters or using XML-based messaging
for extracting and sharing data between ERP and other internal
applications.
SAP, the most popular ERP package, supports integration in the
following ways:
BAPI-API Oriented Integration — SAP R/3 system provides a business
framework consisting of business objects (which represent business
objects such as purchase orders, G/L accounts, employees), which are
made available to the external applications through BAPI (Business
Application Programming Interfaces). BAPIs are object-oriented views
of R/3 applications and data. BAPIs enable synchronous integration
between the SAP R/3 system and external systems. Figure 4.6 below
depicts multiple ways in which BAPIs can be invoked through other
programs.