OroCommerce SAP Business One Integration: A Practical Guide

Summarize this article

SAP Business One is a popular ERP among small and mid-sized manufacturers and distributors. When these companies launch a B2B e-commerce platform such as OroCommerce, the platform has to speak the ERP’s language: business partners, price lists, special prices and warehouses. Here is how an OroCommerce SAP Business One integration works.

What flows between OroCommerce and SAP Business One

• From SAP Business One to OroCommerce: business partners (customers) and their contacts and addresses, items, stock by warehouse, price lists and special prices, order status, deliveries and A/R invoices.
• From OroCommerce to SAP Business One: sales orders, new business partners and addresses, and payment information.

How to connect the two systems

SAP Business One offers two main interfaces. The Service Layer is its modern web API, based on REST and OData, and the right choice for most new integrations. The older DI API is still found in existing add-ons. On the OroCommerce side, a complete API and an integration framework built on message queues handle asynchronous processing.

The integration can be built directly between the two APIs, or through an integration platform or a prebuilt connector. Prebuilt connectors exist for this pair: check how they handle your pricing rules and your customizations before choosing one.

SAP Business One specifics to plan for

• Pricing. SAP Business One combines price lists, special prices per business partner, and period and volume discounts. B2B buyers expect to see their own price, so this logic must be reproduced in OroCommerce price lists or calculated by the ERP on request.
• Business partners. Map SAP Business One business partners, contact persons and addresses to OroCommerce customer accounts, users and addresses, including who may order for which account.
• Warehouses. If you ship from several warehouses, decide which stock each customer sees.
• User-defined fields. Most SAP Business One installations use user-defined fields and tables. The integration must include the ones your processes depend on.

Common pitfalls

• Treating SAP Business One like SAP S/4HANA: they are different products, with different APIs and integration patterns.
• Leaving data ownership unclear between the ERP and the e-commerce platform.
• No monitoring of failed orders: someone must know within minutes when an order does not reach the ERP.

Integration is often the largest line in an OroCommerce budget, as we explain in our article on what drives the cost of an OroCommerce implementation.

Planning an OroCommerce SAP Business One project?

Synolia is one of OroCommerce’s founding SI partners and has delivered dozens of OroCommerce projects, most of them connected to an ERP. Our team in Santiago, Chile works on US business hours, in English and Spanish. Talk to our team about your SAP Business One integration, or read more about our approach to ERP integration.