For organizations that rely on multiple applications and third-party systems, SAP integration is critical for streamlining workflows. That said, SAP ERPs are notoriously difficult to integrate with other systems due to their complexity.

SAP integration processes can vary greatly between different organizations across various industries, given that each SAP may consist of a distinct set of processes. The processes, and consequently, the integration approach, will vary depending on the SAP and non-SAP applications the organization is using.

With the proper SAP application integration tool, however, you can quickly develop APIs from your on-premise SAP systems and deliver outstanding digital services lightning fast. The SAP platform allows you to quickly generate APIs and Angular HTML5 from Business APIs (BAPIs) or Remote Function Calls (RFCs) and deploy them anywhere — the web, cloud, mobile, or SaaS.

Integrating these disparate systems can often prove quite difficult. The main challenges of SAP application integration include:

1. Applying SAP’s integration methods to third-party systems
2. Communicating with non-SAP applications using different technology
3. Providing a scalable SAP application integration infrastructure
4. Ensuring flexibility to add new functionalities
5. Introducing more middleware
6. Requiring a specialized technical skillset
7. Considering the cost

Applying SAP’s integration methods to third-party systems
SAP provides a variety of integration methods and interfaces, which are supposed to help organizations connect and manipulate data and processes. The trouble is, rather than using industry standards, SAP has developed its own capabilities like:

• BAPIs (Business APIs)
• IDocs (Intermediate documents)
• ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming)
• RFC (Remote Function Call)
• JCo (Java Connector)

SAP’s proprietary integration tools don’t extend well to third-party systems. Rather than facilitating integration, they complicate the process further. Let’s take IDocs as an example — there are over 600 IDoc types that you need to consider when developing a strategy for your organization’s integration project.

Add to that the fact that BAPIs don’t support all available SAP transactions, and that RFC might not be documented or supported by SAP, and the issue becomes apparent.

OpenLegacy makes the most out of RFCs and BAPIs and allows you to utilize them and expose them as Java through the SAP JCo. With SAP integration platform, a single Java developer can generate both OData for use with Fiori and standard REST with Angular HTML5 in a few simple steps. This allows you to generate APIs from your SAP systems in minutes or days, instead of months.