E-commerce: Cloud solution connects online platforms with SAP

The project at Fnac, a large marketplace in France, shows how the SAP system can be connected to FIS/TradeFlex. There is no question that marketplaces realize many benefits in both B2C and B2B. Despite many advantages, there are challenges that can hardly be overcome with standard solutions of the SAP system.

Retail International (Re-In) has been operating various online stores in the fields of consumer electronics, household appliances, model making and technology since 2008. On France's well-known marketplace Fnac, which has a similar mechanism to the world-famous marketplace Amazon, Re-In lists around 45,000 offers via TradeFlex from FIS.

Central areas of e-commerce can be handled well with the ERP system from SAP. However, when it comes to trading on marketplaces, many aggregators reach their limits.

"The main challenge is that it is not yet possible to connect marketplaces directly via SAP standard processes,"

says Florian Kohler, Head of Data Analytics at Re-In. Interfaces are often designed in-house, which of course ties up enormous development capacities, but also downstream support capacities.

The consequence is that once a certain number of connections is reached, further expansion of the existing marketplace portfolio is no longer possible without further ado, ergo scalability suffers. Without interfaces, a direct flow of information cannot be guaranteed either. However, the importance of a dynamic real-time data flow is shown by the area of transferred inventories: If further orders are received when inventories are already empty, these have to be canceled again, which results in negative evaluations and causes dissatisfaction among customers.

For Re-In, it was clear that a digital solution had to be found to automate the sales processes for additional marketplaces without additional developer resources. Together with FIS, a pilot project was started in which the SAP system was connected to the Fnac marketplace via the cloud-based middleware TradeFlex. TradeFlex acts as an interface between the marketplace and the SAP system and controls all sales processes.

It is important for sellers to have a consistent connection between the marketplaces and the ERP system. All steps in the sales process must be able to be automated in this way, and without any development effort of their own, in order to cope with the high number of orders. Only with a direct flow of information and two-way communication is it possible today to meet the challenges as a seller on an online trading platform. The deep integration of the marketplaces with the SAP system ensures end-to-end process coverage.

Information can be obtained directly from SAP and made available to it in reverse. The two-way communication is completely automated, without having to tie up developer capacities. Jobs are fetched directly from the marketplaces, stored in the cloud in encapsulated form, and the entire administration management is transferred to the SAP system. This completely eliminates the need to start jobs in the conventional SAP system.

When the orders are transferred from the cloud, they are created by calling the OData services in SAP, provided there is confirmation of the queried order quantity. Directly the back communication takes place with transmission of the order number to the cloud, which stores it.

The cloud solution in turn communicates with the marketplace and can retrieve the address data to then forward it directly to the SAP system. A particularly smart feature is the integration of a delivery block, which is applied to an order in the first step after it has been collected from the marketplace. Only when the address delivery from the marketplace arrives in the cloud is this removed and it continues into logistics.

This is followed by other subsequent processes, such as delivery, invoicing, and even the receipt of returns in SAP, which are also fully automated by the APIs. In addition, such an interface with deep integration into the SAP system has the advantage that all information about an item, such as invoices, is stored in the cloud.

As soon as a payment is made to the seller in the marketplace, the open items are cleared in the SAP system. Since a payment from the marketplace to the seller usually contains numerous items, sellers save manual effort in accounting through the automated assignment and clearing of open items. TradeFlex determines the invoice number itself and transmits it to the SAP system matching the order number.

The initial challenges of the integration lay primarily in the uniform design of the complete processes, which were initially considered independent of the marketplace. It was important to control the parameters in such a way that they would be self-explanatory for future marketplaces. The Fnac marketplace is the pilot project in the collaboration between TradeFlex and Re-In and was completed with great success to everyone's satisfaction.