The B2B capabilities in Integration Suite

Electronic data interchange (EDI) has outlived every platform that tried to replace it. Customers still send X12 850 purchase orders and EDIFACT ORDERS messages, suppliers still return 855 confirmations and 856 ship notices, and invoices still travel as 810s and INVOICs. What changes is the middleware in between. For two decades SAP customers ran that traffic through on-premise EDI converters or through the B2B add-on for SAP Process Integration and SAP Process Orchestration. SAP's cloud answer is a set of B2B capabilities inside SAP Integration Suite.

Contoso Motor Co. is a typical starting point. Its ECC interfaces run on SAP Process Orchestration 7.5 (systems XD1, XQ1 and XP1), and 11 of the 64 integrated configurations on XP1 are EDI interfaces for six trading partners. Great Lakes Fleet Services sends 850 orders over AS2 and receives 855, 856 and 810 documents back. Lakeside Components exchanges purchase orders, confirmations and ship notices over SFTP. Four smaller aftermarket customers send 850 orders only. All of it runs on the B2B add-on: the AS2 adapter, the EDI separator and the X12 converter modules. Theo, the integration lead, will move these interfaces to Integration Suite after hypercare, and this course follows that move.

Four capabilities, one job

An EDI team does the same jobs on any platform: keep a record of each partner, agree what will be exchanged and how, translate and route the messages, and watch the traffic. Integration Suite splits those jobs across four capabilities that work together.

Trading Partner Management is the part most people mean when they say "B2B on Integration Suite". It is where you create the company profile (your own organization, including subsidiaries), trading partner profiles, communication partner profiles for AS2 settings, agreement templates and trading partner agreements. You find it in Integration Suite under Design > B2B Scenarios, with tabs for partner profiles, agreement templates, agreements and Partner Directory data.

Integration Advisor holds the content: type systems such as ASC X12, UN/EDIFACT and SAP IDoc, and the MIGs and MAGs you build from them. A MIG for Great Lakes Fleet Services' 850 records which segments and qualifiers Great Lakes actually uses; a MAG maps that MIG to Contoso's ORDERS05 MIG. TPM references these artifacts in agreements; it does not replace them.

Cloud Integration runs the messages, but not with one integration flow per partner. SAP delivers the package Cloud Integration - Trading Partner Management V2, a configure-only set of generic flows: Step 1 sender flows per adapter (AS2, AS2 MDN, IDoc, SOAP, ProcessDirect), Step 2 interchange processing, and Step 3 receiver communication. Those few flows serve every partner because they read partner-specific parameters from the Partner Directory at runtime.

What changes compared with the B2B add-on

On Process Orchestration, each EDI interface is usually its own set of objects: a sender channel with the AS2 adapter, an EDI separator channel, module chains with converter modules, a mapping and a receiver channel. Adding a partner means cloning objects. TPM turns that model around: you describe the partner and the agreement as data, and generic flows do the processing. Adding a partner becomes a configuration task rather than a development task.

Who does what

TPM uses the Integration Suite role collections. The PI_Integration_Developer persona maintains profiles, templates and agreements and activates agreements. The PI_Business_Expert persona monitors integration flows, reads payloads and performs operational tasks such as retrying, restarting or canceling B2B messages. At Contoso, Theo's integration developers hold the first role in the development tenant (CMC_DEV); the support desk gets the second in production. Nadia, the security lead, reviews both before go-live because the business expert role can read invoice and order payloads.