SAP S/4HANA Extended Business Process Scenario

Description

The main intent of this scenario is to complement an existing business process in an SAP solution – currently SAP S/4HANA with additional business process steps. This involves adding major logic and/or additional data and goes beyond simple UI changes.

This application showcases:

Building applications on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) using SAP Cloud Application Programming Model(CAP)
Consuming events from SAP S/4HANA on premise using SAP Event Mesh
Consuming REST APIs from SAP S/4HANA on premise using SAP Business Technology Platform Connectivity Service

Business Scenario

A business scenario is used to showcase how to build a S/4 HANA on premise extension Application on SAP BTP.

John who is an employee of Business Partner Validation Firm iCredible, which is a third-party vendor of ACME Corporation would like to get notifications whenever new Business Partners are added in the S/4HANA backend system of ACME Corporation. John would then be able to review the Business Partner details in his extension app. He would proceed to visit the Business Partner’s registered office and do some background verification. John would then proceed to update/validate the verification details into the extension app. Once the details are verified, the Business Partner gets activated in the S/4HANA system of ACME Corporation.

Custom extension application that works independently from S/4HANA.
Changes in S/4 communicated via events in real time to extension application.
Compute intensive processing available on demand (serverless environment).
Vendor personnel needs access to only custom app

Architecture

Solution Diagram

The Business Partner Validation application is developed using the SAP Cloud Application programming Model (CAP) and runs on the SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry runtime. It consumes platform services like SAP Event Mesh, SAP HANA and Connectivity. The events occuring in S/4 HANA on premise are inserted into the Event Mesh queue. The application running in Cloud Foundry is notified on events, consumes them from the queue and inserts the event data into the HANA database. The Business Partner Validation Application uses S/4 HANA REST API's to read additional Business Partner Data from the S/4 HANA system.

Requirements

SAP S/4HANA on premise system.
SAP Business Technology Platform account

For local development you would require the following:

Node js

Make sure you run the latest long-term support (LTS) version of Node.js with an even number like 16. Refrain from using odd versions, for which some modules with native parts will have no support and thus might even fail to install. In case of problems, see the Troubleshooting guide for CAP for more details.

Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (CLI)
Visual Studio Code
cds-dk
SQLite
To build the multi target application, we need the Cloud MTA Build tool, download the tool from here
For Windows system, install 'MAKE' from https://sap.github.io/cloud-mta-build-tool/makefile/
multiapps plugin - cf install-plugin multiapps
mbt - npm install -g mbt

Entitlements

The application requires below set of SAP Business Technology Platform Entitlements/Quota

Service	Plan	Number of Instances
Event Mesh	default	1
SAP HANA Schemas & HDI Containers	hdi-shared	1
SAP HANA Cloud	hana	1
Cloud Foundry runtime		1

Configuration

Step 1: Setup SAP BTP subaccount

You can use SAP BTP - Boosters to setup the subaccount. Boosters Will create the subaccount with the required entitlements, subscriptions and assign the required roles to your user to run this application. Steps to run the booster are provided in link. You can create subaccount manually also following link

Step 2: S/4HANA Enable OData Service for business partner

Step 3: Setup connectivity between S/4HANA system, SAP BTP

Step 4: Build and deploy the CAP application

Steps to deploy locally

Open terminal in VSCode
Run npm install sqlite3 --save-dev
Run cds watch

Steps to deploy the application on Cloud Foundry

Build the application mbt build -p=cf
Login to Cloud Foundry by typing the below commands on command prompt
```
cf api <api>
cf login -u <username> -p <password>
```
api - URL of the Cloud Foundry landscape that you are trying to connect to.

Select the org and space when prompted to.
Deploy the application

Navigate to mta_archives folder and run the below command from CLI

cf deploy BusinessPartnerValidation_1.0.0.mtar

Step 5: Configure event based communication between S/4HANA and Event Mesh

Demo script

Go to Launchpad and access the 'Business Partner Validation' application
Click on Business Partner Validation tile

The list of BusinessPartners along with their verification status gets displayed.

Enter transaction code 'bp'

Click on Person

Provide first name, last name for the business partner
Provide the address
Move to the status tab and check mark the 'Central Block' lock. Save the BP. This will create a new Business Partner