Help with direction for SAP integration

[Former Member]

Hello,

I work for a company which develops (in .NET) systems for production line management and product tracking in the pharmaceutical industry.

I've been asked to estimate the effort and cost involved in integrating our products with SAP, however nobody in our company has experience with using, integration or development with SAP!

There are a number of scenarios where we want to integrate our systems with SAP for our customers:

1) SAP can be used to generate the unique serial numbers which are printed onto the pharmaceutical products and their packaging. We would need to integrate with SAP in order to receive these serial numbers so that we can print them onto the product.

2)We would also like to receive notification of new Work Orders/Manufacturing Orders are generated within SAP.

3) Once our system has verified that the serial number has been applied correctly then our system needs to sent that serial number back to SAP so that it can be recorded against the batch and/or work order.

4) Additionally our system would need to associate each product serial number with the unique package (e.g. case, pallet) serial number it is associated with. This is also know as aggregation.

Questions

Which of the SAP integration methods (SOA, NetWeaver etc) would best suit what we are doing?

My preference would be us the web-services as we have experience with calling and developing web services.

How long do you think it would take an experiences .NET developer to get up to speed on SAP?

What are the typically costs in getting started with SAP development?

Apologies if these are very general questions but we are just starting our investigation of integration with SAP so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

CJ.

[Former Member]

Hi CJ,

my advice is to apply the webservices path; design on conceptual level the interaction paths / scenarios between the 2 systems / environments, design them in a Contract-First approach, and next implement the contract on either SAP or MS side; and invoke the webservice form either MS or SAP client.

For your scenario's 1, 3 and 4: I advice to implement the business behaviour via SAP BAPI function modules within the SAP business backend; and expose the SAP BAPIs as WS-I webservices. You can import these directly within VS.NET. You can generate the BAPI WebServices from within SAP NetWeaver Development Studio.

Another approach is to apply the BizTalk WCF LOB Adapter to expose the SAP business functionality. See for more information my blog entry [Apply WCF BizTalk Adapter Pack to service-enable SAP BAPI/RFC's|http://williamvanstrien.blogspot.com/2009/08/apply-wcf-biztalk-adapter-pack-to.html]

For your scenario 2, you can either apply a polling or a active signaling approach. In case of polling, the .NET side as client periodically polls the SAP system. The setup is then same as for 1,3,4. However, you can also turn the roles around, and implement a listener interface + implementation within .NET side, and let the SAP functionality invoke this web service via a SAP proxy.

Best regards, William.

[Former Member]

HI William,

Thanks for your answer.

Regarding the BAPI development, can you give me any idea as to how long that this might typically take when starting from scratch in SAP ? I know this is a horrible question to ask but I'm just trying to get a rough idea, is it days, weeks, months?

Do you know if the SAP Auto-ID Infrastructure uses web-services interface as XI?

Thanks again,

CJ.

[Former Member]

Hi CJ,

terrible but justifiable question

However, I'm not able to give a good answer on it, since I'm myself a .NET developer.

Anyone else can give an indication ?

Best regards, William.

[Former Member]

Hello CJ.,

You should take into account a week for a simple BAPI up to a month for really complex one. The actual BAPI can be build in just a few hours but to add business logic and make it work correctly in a SOA environment will take some extra time.

Regards,

Marcel