It is quite important to integrate SugarCRM with SAP Business One back-end. This not only helps you have a transparent and synced front and back end but also opens numerous paths for your business to grow, and reach new heights.
SAP Business One is a popular ERP software platform meant medium-size businesses. The solution help companies manage critical business functions across sales, distribution, financials, manufacturing. SugarCRM on other hand is a flexible cloud customer relationship management software tool which helps to create and improve extraordinary customer relationships and offer a better control over workflows, customer support, marketing activities and host of other activities. SugarCRM can be easily customized according to the business requirement of the organization.
If you are just starting with your integration assignment, it be best to know the best practices while integrating SAP with third party applications. You might also want to explore our SAP SugarCRM Connector to find how SugarCRM can be integrated with the leading ERP application.
If you are looking to understand how SAP can be integrated with a .NET application. This is a great place to start and see an example.
Why integrate SAP Business One with SugarCRM
Integrating SugarCRM with SAP Business One is a very beneficial solution to address a lot of business problems. For example, SAP Business One is limited to the people at headquarters. Salespeople can get more number of customers and they do not have access to register the customers in SAP. So, they will register them within CRM from their mobile devices and these needs to be maintained in SAP. To maintain all the customers gathered by the Salesperson in SAP, it requires a lot of manual effort and time. So, in order to reduce the manual effort and save time, this process should be automated.
In this article, we are going to automate this process and sync Products within SAP to SugarCRM along with their prices from the selected price list as products and prices are defined by headquarters (what they sell and at what price) so, it will come from headquarter system (SAP) into CRM.
To integrate SAP B1 and SugarCRM and to automate your business process, we are using .NET application. It allows an ERP user to selectively upload SAP Business One Item Master to SugarCRM.
.NET application
This application Acts as Bridge or connector between two different applications. To communicate with the applications, firstly we need to configure the credentials within the .Net application. Web service(REST) will be used to communicate with the SugarCRM and DI API(DI server) will be used to communicate with SAP B1. Data integration may be bidirectional or unidirectional based on the requirement. For example, let’s say
- Accounts (bidirectional) : Salespeople can get more customers and they don’t have SAP to register them so, they will register them within CRM from their mobile devices. Therefore accounts, can be synced in bi-directional.
- Contacts (bidirectional) : Contacts again can be registered in CRM when sales people meet new prospects so it will be bi-directional.
- Products (unidirectional) : products and prices are defined by headquarters, so it will come from headquarter system (SAP) into CRM. So, it will be unidirectional.
This application integrates the data based on time interval which is configured in the application. Depending upon the organization requirement time interval will be configured.
Syncing SAP Item master to products within SugarCRM
The following are the steps to sync item master in SAP B1 to Sugar CRM.
- Add a New Item master in SAP B1.
- Start sync to SugarCRM using .NET application
Step 1 : Add a New Item master in SAP B1
- Login to SAP GUI. Navigate to Modules -> Inventory -> Item Master Data.
- Enter Item number, description, and price for the selected price list etc.
- After syncing product to sugar, we are going to update the sugar product id in SAP. To save the sugar product id, we created a UDF at Item master level in SAP.
- Click on Add.
Step 2: Start sync to SugarCRM using .NET application
- Using our .Net application we are syncing the item master to Sugar CRM.
- After syncing the product, sugar product id will be updated in SAP.
- Copy the Sugar product id from SAP and search with the id in SugarCRM.
- In the below screen we can observe that product got synced to Sugar.
- We are syncing product information and SAP Item number.
By following the above steps, you can sync the product from SAP Business one to SugarCRM using .Net application. We sincerely hope that this was useful and any comment of feedback will be very helpful.
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