Integration Advisor and the type system library

Every EDI partner says it uses "the standard". Then the first test file arrives and the purchase order number sits in a different element, the ship-to uses a code nobody documented, and the unit of measure is EA where SAP expects PCE. B2B mapping is mostly the work of pinning down how this partner uses that standard. Integration Advisor, a capability of SAP Integration Suite, is SAP's tool for that work.

SAP Help describes Integration Advisor as a cloud application that streamlines the implementation of B2B, A2A and B2G integration, using a crowd-based machine learning approach to help you create integration content. It runs in the Cloud Foundry environment. The working method has four parts: start from a type system in the library, narrow one of its messages into a message implementation guideline (MIG), connect a source and a target MIG in a mapping guideline (MAG), and generate runtime artifacts for SAP Cloud Integration or SAP Process Orchestration.

Contoso's starting point

Contoso Motor Co. exchanges EDI with two partners that matter for this course. Great Lakes Fleet Services sends ASC X12 850 purchase orders that become sales orders in S/4HANA, and receives X12 810 invoices, such as invoice 90001877 for sales order 1000457. Contoso sends purchase orders for rotors to Lakeside Components as X12 850 files. Today those mappings live in SAP Process Orchestration on XP1. As Theo's integration team moves Contoso's EDI to SAP Integration Suite after stabilization, he wants each partner's rules written down once, in a form both people and runtimes can use. That is what MIGs and MAGs are.

What a type system is

In Integration Advisor terms, a type system is a self-contained message standard owned by a single agency: its syntax rules, modeling method and template library. ANSI ASC X12 maintains ASC X12; SAP SE maintains SAP IDoc. Each type system contains messages, reusable complex types (such as a party or an address), simple types for leaf values, and codelists. You browse them under Discover > Type Systems, open a message, pick a version, and either create a MIG from it or, for EDI type systems, download the message as an XSD without creating a MIG.

The library is large. SAP Help lists 40 ASC X12 versions, from 002001 to 008060, and over 300 X12 message types, including 810 Invoice, 850 Purchase Order, 855 Purchase Order Acknowledgment, 856 Ship Notice/Manifest and 997 Functional Acknowledgment. X12 also has an Envelope message that captures the ISA/GS interchange and functional group structure. Older SAP blogs also mention an SAP S/4HANA Cloud OData type system; it isn't in the current B2B standards overview, so confirm in your tenant before you plan around it.

Custom type systems

When a partner uses a proprietary format, an extended standard message or a standard that the library lacks, you create a custom type system under Design > Custom Type Systems and upload messages from XSD or WSDL files, IDoc structures, SOA messages, or custom codelists. SAP Help notes that a tenant supports one custom type system for each kind (XML, IDoc, SOA, codelists). A custom message must be activated before a MIG built on it can be activated, and an activated custom message version can't be deleted.

Contoso has one candidate: Kenji's team extended ORDERS05 with a Z-segment for Great Lakes' fleet contract number. That extended IDoc is uploaded into the IDoc custom type system so the target MIG matches what CMP really accepts, rather than the unextended standard.

Who does what

Access comes from role collections in the SAP BTP cockpit. iadv-content-developer covers discovering type systems, custom type systems, creating, simulating and activating MIGs and MAGs, and exporting or injecting runtime artifacts. iadv-content-administrator adds unlocking guidelines locked by other users and switching off the proposal service. iadv-content-read can browse, simulate and export but not edit or import. At Contoso, Theo's two B2B developers hold the developer collection, Theo holds the administrator collection, and Priya's testers get read access so they can simulate and download documentation without changing anything.