Sharepoint – SAP Change Management Process (Transport requests) using Talend

The goal of this article is to emphasize on Talend Data Integration capabilities and features.

The implementation of a rather easy scenario for ERP Change Management Process has been chosen to serve exactly this scope.

This is an ideal solution when there is a great need for integrating data and your enterprise is using:

• • MS Sharepoint On Premise version.

SharePoint is commonly used as an enterprise Intranet and using it’s mechanisms (Windows authentication, Lists, workflows, etc.) proves to be a quite straight forward solution for implementing several approval processes.

• SAP ERP.

What if you can achieve that 5X faster at 1/5^th of the average price?

Process analysis

Our case includes the following steps:

1. Change request creation (Sharepoint).
2. Change request approval (Sharepoint). Each change request can include several SAP transport requests that create a specific list where each item is a transport request (Figure 1).

   

3. Import transport request (SAP QAS).
4. Requestor verification of change.
5. Import transport request (SAP Prd).

The Transport request list is read, uploaded in an intermediate database for control reasons and then imports SAP transport requests.  This way we ensure information integrity, consistency and accessibility.

The process runs using two Talend jobs so as to avoid designing too complicated jobs.

• The first job (Figure 2) downloads the sharepoint list and updates the database.

• The second job (Figure 3)

1. Iterates on the requests that need to be imported in SAP,
2. Checks if Co files & Data files exist (if not it terminates the process with a message).
3. Copies the files in the appropriate SAP directory.
4. Imports the requests.
5. Logs BAPI return message (Figure 4) to the database and
   

    

6. Finally updates the sharepoint list (Figure5).