A solid integration strategy is crucial for providing the flexibility and agility organizations require to meet rapidly changing business needs. Hear directly from SAP Expert Arghadip Kar as he answers your questions, including:

• Why is integration so important now?
• What are the most important components for integration?
• Which skills would be most important to learn to succeed with integration?

Introduction My name is Arghadip Kar. I have been working with SAP for the last 15 years. I started my career with IBM as an SAP workflow consultant, and I've traveled across the world, Europe, Brazil, and America. I work with big clients like Nestle, Phillip Morris, then PepsiCo and other clients, and I learned a lot from there. My focus is mostly to build something which can be reused and to listen to the customer. It's not that, just because SAP says "listen, this is the way to go..." means it should be the way to go. Currently I'm working with NRG Energy, and here I have learned different things because I am sitting on the other side of the table (as a client, not as a consultant), and now I understand that a solution with less clicks is better than a solution with more clicks, because the higher number of clicks you make, the more chances of making mistakes. With SAP S/4HANA you have a solution that has less clicks, so that's very important. Why is integration so important now? Nowadays every client uses SAP—even SAP themselves (i.e., Concur, Ariba, etc.). These are SAP solutions, but these need to be integrated within SAP S/4HANA. So integration is very important. Thirty to 40% of the time in an SAP project is spent on doing integration. What really matters is now the world has changed. People want solutions like a plug and play. It needs to be done fast. A perfect analogy that I heard from my son is, you don't need training to play a game in an app on an iPhone. So integration with SAP S/4HANA needs to be like this. It should be fast; it cannot take a year or two years. Integration is wherever you think, like Outlook and the integration of services. Everyone wants to partner and everyone wants to do a handshake with each other because that's very important. Imagine the whole Google world—they give you everything in Google because they are doing wonderful integration with everything. Those are the things SAP S/4HANA is going to bring in. There are different types of integration—you have the REST API, and you have the other different types of APIs, which are SOAP APIs. With SOAP and REST both will work, but slowly the world is going to the REST world. So those things will be there. Those are very important things. Now you might say “Oh, I don't have any SAP integration in my ECC6.” Yes you do, because an IDOC is an integration. A web service which you're calling from a homegrown solution is an integration. Now with SAP S/4HANA, it needs to be real time. We are not going to go in the phase where it will take days to know “Oh, I'm entering a time in another system.” For example, if I'm using Workday and I'm entering time, there can be an issue with that if the time I'm entering to the cost center or the work order is closed. It needs to do real-time integration. So those are the major important things that are going to happen in the next few days and few years. And integration is going to happen very fast. Because everyone wants a cloud solution. So with SAP S/4HANA, with all the features it has, it is faster because we have all the data services. You have CDS views, and reporting also is much faster. Another very important thing is you have the SAP appliance cloud, the cloud appliance library, where you can do analytics on cloud, and then you have other features like a Microsoft Excel integration with SAP. Those are wonderful things that Microsoft, SAP, even Google or Google docs have created. If someone doesn't like the blue screen in SAP, they don’t need to see it. They can live in the Outlook, Microsoft Excel world and log in through Excel into SAP, and get everything, whatever they want. And everything, whatever KPI they want to design, they can do it in real-time without logging in first. So that's one of the major features that SAP S/4HANA brings you in the use of integration. What are the most important components for integration? With SAP S/4HANA most of the companies are slowly moving to other cloud solutions. Like SAP is trying to push with SuccessFactors—and Workday is another solution that is not SAP, but lots of people use this, though they use SAP ERP S/4HANA—so those things are going to come. Another popular one is Ariba that needs to come. Ariba before used to do XML and other stuff, and now they have the cloud integration gateway. So if you're an ABAP developer, it's a good thing that you also know the stuff in the cloud platform, some of the coding portion, and even SAP has given a new ABAP engine in the cloud platform, which is brand new. So people can practice. And what SAP came to know is let's not invest in Java and all those things where, you know, they don't have so much skillset. They've created their own ABAP engine in the cloud and you can build your own ABAP code. And then another one that is very important is the reporting piece, because lots of things with SAP S/4HANA, many reporting engines, are coming. You have the Power BI and all those things. They made it so easy that a person can get reports on the fly without even logging into SAP and they can schedule it. As a person doing ABAP for 15 years, I have created thousands of programs just to extract data and give it and schedule it, and the person will get it by logging into Outlook or go to the folder and get it out, and then he puts it in his formula. Now he doesn't need to do it. It's all automated. And now with the new things like the RPN, the intelligent RPA process, you get the KPIs in a matter of two minutes without a person doing it manually. And the whole thing we want to achieve with integration is very important because it's like everyone helping each other, so that the customer or the company gets optimized data. It can be Oracle helping SAP, Microsoft helping SAP, Google helping SAP, or Amazon helping SAP. So integration is very important. Which skills would be most important to learn to succeed with integration? First of all, lots of people say “Oh, ABAP is going to die.” It's never going to die because there will be customization required. So basic skills in ABAP are always required. Because you are going to code something, you are going to build a REST API, you are going to build a web service or something and for that you need ABAP. Now one great thing that SAP S/4HANA has built, and it's like a hidden treasure, are web services. Before in SAP we used to have only probably 900 web services standard. And in SAP S/4HANA, we have over 2,800 web services and all are brand new out of the box. So it's ready to use. You just need to integrate. So my suggestion would be to focus on ABAP and then try to get some other skillsets, such as how to build REST APIs and SOAP APIs. That's very important. Once you build that, then it's a little difficult because ABAP is very indirect. If you have an error, they give you the error right off, but some of those are REST and SOAP, and let's be honest, the ABAP code and the ABAP engine has pampered us. It’s very easy to understand what is there, but with other things, such as REST APIs, you need some type of skillsets. But once you get it, it's pretty easy. It's the way you pass the data, etc. Now there's another thing called the Cloud Platform Engine, where you need to learn new stuff. But again, let's be honest, there is some standard stuff that everyone does. You need to either know the person who really knows it, or you need to find another program and then start to copy-paste and edit and change it. So that's my suggestion: focus on the web service, the standard web service, the REST APIs, and look at how SAP has developed. And then you can copy, paste, and change it. I mean that’s how most of the ABAP experts learned ABAP. That's my advice to all the technical persons who are focusing on integration. Again, lots of times we see “IDOCS is dying.” Well, no, IDOC will always be there. Banks are not going to change anything. And recently even Ariba with SAP S/4HANA is coming back to IDOCS, because it's easier to do it. So everything is there. It's some mix and match. If you know IDOCS, it's good. You just need to add in the web service and other features and the cloud platform, which is brand new. And I think once you have this, at least it will give you another 20 years in your timeline to survive. Related Resources Gain additional insights with Video Resources and Training Resources by SAP Expert Arghadip Kar.