For many companies, the benefits of a cloud migration with Basware are clear, but it is often unclear to the IT manager what this means for the interface with the ERP system. In practice, Sjoerd de Heer, solution architect at ICreative, sees roughly three common scenarios among ICreative customers.
The commercial world is becoming increasingly complex as companies interact with thousands of international suppliers. Moreover, today it is not unusual for large enterprises to have as many as ten to fifteen software systems in use. Integrating these systems is often already a real challenge and sometimes results in endlessly expensive IT projects.
Not surprisingly, interoperability of systems, is one of the key issues when an enterprise wants to implement a new best-of-breed application to automate processes. This integration issue also comes into play once companies choose to migrate existing applications to the cloud. After all, applications such as Basware must be able to send data to and from the ERP package, regardless of whether they run on-premises or in the cloud.
When companies choose to process vendor invoices in the cloud with a source-to-pay automation solution such as Basware, many IT managers wonder what this means for the interface with the ERP system. Is the investment made in the current interface a waste of money in a SaaS migration?
Easy and seamless system integration has always been part of Basware's strategy. Basware is a cloud-based application that provides a number of predefined methods for interfacing with one or more ERP systems. To this end, Basware has developed anyERP; self-developed middleware software that allows Basware to interface with more than 250 different ERPs. This makes integration fast and cost-effective.
With Basware anyERP, it is possible to retrieve and use master data, such as supplier-related information, accounting data, such as VAT codes, and organizational information, for example, approval limits and related cost centers.
One of the most common ERP systems in large companies and institutions, and among the ICreative customer base, is SAP. In SAP, a standard link based on Bapi and/or RFC is available, allowing the configuration to be reused. 'We establish a VPN tunnel between the ERP and the cloud. Then the interface can largely be reused. There is then a high degree of security when transferring and a short lead time can be achieved,' says De Heer.
The second scenario De Heer often deals with is interfacing with Unit4's Coda Financials. Here, too, the preferred scenario can be deployed, albeit with one major difference. 'With on-premise, you use database queries to retrieve master data, or master data. With SaaS, that's not allowed, but we can describe those to xml files which only requires transport to the cloud (SFTP).'
An exception has been made for master data (supplier lists, orders, booking data). Due to the potentially large volumes of data and the structure of Coda to retrieve these elements, there is a preference to exchange them on an xml file basis via SFTP rather than via the web services available in Coda.
Coda's web service is excellent for querying single elements, but for example, to query a supplier including relevant bank information, different web services in Coda need to be invoked. To do this daily for several thousand suppliers, the load on the Coda web services becomes unacceptably large. 'ICreative has the necessary database queries required to generate these xml files,' said De Heer.
A generic scenario also applies to the other ERP packages. 'The business documents or master data coming from one application often do not have the format needed for another application. We can convert the queries that Basware does on the database so that they generate XML, which transfers the master data,' says De Heer. 'The advice is to stay as close as possible to the Basware master data files and keep it as clean as possible. Usually much of the effort is then already done in the initial setup of on-premises.'
Thus, in most cases, the investment in ERP interfacing in a transformation to the cloud can remain relatively limited. However, the exact impact of a migration depends on the complexity of the IT landscape. Therefore, it is a good idea to involve the IT manager at an early stage.