Easier Integration between S/4HANA and Microsoft Teams

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Key Takeaways

⇨ Integrating SAP processes with Microsoft Teams can streamline workflows but typically involves complex development and maintenance.

⇨ Looply simplifies the integration of SAP and Teams by offering a no-code, AI-assisted platform, reducing the need for custom development.

⇨ Looply's tools, such as the Workflow Studio and Notification Centre, facilitate easy deployment, management, and maintenance of SAP and Teams integrations at scale.

Integrating key SAP processes to Microsoft Teams, such that approval processes can be executed in Teams, can accelerate those processes and lead to a range of benefits.

Integrating key SAP processes to Microsoft Teams, such that process notifications are provided in Teams, and approval processes can be executed in Teams, can accelerate those processes and lead to a range of benefits.

There are several approaches you can take to achieve this integration.

Explore related questions

Within S/4HANA or Business Suite, you will need to build some kind of trigger from each process, in order to pass document and process data to a cloud-based application.

That application would then need to handle the request, and trigger the generation of a Microsoft Adaptive Card within Microsoft Azure, such that it can be pushed into the appropriate Teams chat.

So, some determination of the Teams account of the recipient will be required along the way.

Microsoft Adaptive Card

If the user takes an action on the card, such as Approve or Reject, or adds in information (like rejection reason), then the action and information need to be captured, and then sent back to SAP, such that the particular business process can continue.

So once again, a cloud based application will be required to accept the data from the Adaptive Card, to determine what service to call on what back-end SAP system, and to make that call, handling user authentication along the way.

Back in S/4HANA or Business Suite, the service might not be pre-delivered: It is likely that some custom service will be needed to accept the data and trigger the update such that the process continues.

This means quite a lot of development for each process. And even if you harness some kind of integration software, this will only handle the API call, not the major developments.

Most approaches will involve multiple products, with complex configuration and development. And you need to do this every time, for each and every specific business process step.

ABAP development

oData API to fetch documents
oData service to trigger SAP Event Mesh
oData service to update a document/process

BTP

Various service set-up
Configure SAP Event Mesh
Develop custom application
Develop UI for Teams Chat app in Bridge Framework using JSON
Deploy resources to Microsoft Azure using Bridge Framework Automation Pipeline

Azure

Various set-up tasks

With this approach you can, for example, trigger Event Mesh based on an item in Workflow.

Once the action is taken on the card, the update would integrate back with the Workflow, so the process would continue as normal.

However (and it’s a big ‘however’), in real life:

We may want to send a Card to the initiator as well as the approver(s);
We may want to update the various Cards when an action is taken;
Since the work item is still available in the Inbox, the approver may process that item within the Inbox, so the Cards in Teams are left ‘hanging’.
Testing and ongoing maintenance can be a challenge as you have no ‘development’ Teams environment.

So what appears to be a relatively simple use case, actually requires multiple and complex integrations between the back-end process and Microsoft Teams.

The lessons are:

Real life is complex;
Significant development is required to integrate each process step;
Any changes need to be made to multiple different custom developments and configurations: ongoing maintenance needs multi-skilled experts.

Which might mean that you don’t have a business case to build the integration: it’s just too much effort.

Looply Workflow Studio

Each workflow can call functions or APIs to collect data from or update data to other systems in the enterprise. And each workflow has a unique API URL so that it can be triggered from any system too. So although specific integrations to SAP S/4HANA and Microsoft Teams are provided, the reach of the solution is much wider.

When changes are needed to be made to deployed Cards and Workflows, then new versions are automatically generated, such that existing processes are not impacted.

This means the speed of development is greatly accelerated, and ongoing maintenance is much easier, so there is a business case to provide Teams integration for many SAP-based processes.