This is a showcase of a tool that we built for customers to be used alongside with SAP Cloud ERP.

Quick facts about the tool:

  • Connected to SAP Via SOAP and oData API’s
  • Integrates into the standard business processes
  • Enables very quick data entry, integrations to 3rd parties, enables custom business processes
  • Built with Nodejs as backend and Reactjs as front end and hosted in Heroku

Why the tool was built?

While the SAP Cloud ERP is great tool for many different businesses then sometimes the standard interfaces and business processes are not the best fit for all the users. Therefore something needs to be adjusted in order to make the maximum out of the tool.

But with cloud solution’s there’s limits on how much you can customize the solution and in many cases you cannot change the user interface at all nor can you adjust the default business processes.

This means that while the cloud tool is great for 95% of the time then there are some edge cases where UI needs to be adjusted and you cannot do it.

Or you need to integrate some other cloud tool into it. Or maybe theres many manual data entry that needs to be done what can be automated. Etc.

So what can you do about it?

You can give in to the fact and live with the knowledge that you cannot do the things the way you wanted and not be the most efficient with the tool.

You can change the way’s you are working.

Or you can take the API-s from the tool and build some custom integration that will fit your needs. This is what we did this time.

Features of the tool

As stated above that tool was meant to compliment existing cloud ERP and add more value to the users.

Some of the features included:

  • Creating multiple supplier invoices by copy-pasting data from excel
  • Creating multiple purchase orders by copy-pasting data from excel
  • Syncing exchange rates from European Central Bank daily
  • Taking production data from manufacturing lines and upload it
  • Automating updating of thosands of project tasks with materials, times etc.
  • Regular tax declarations for government
  • Complex data analysises
  • Integration with external system(HRM, e-commerce etc.)

Video of the tool in action:

Creating multiple supplier invoices in SAP Cloud ERP

Creating Purchase order with more then 100 rows in SAP Cloud ERP

While most the features are very generic and can be used by many different companies then some were very specific made to fit.

A Wood Processing Company

A Wood Processing Company was using SAP Cloud ERP but the standard processes didn’t fit exactly their needs. Their issue was that they were doing process manufacturing where at the time of the input they didn’t know that kind of output they would get. It was because they were sorting unsorted wood into different quality classes and wood being a natural resource you never know for sure what you are getting.

Also the standard user interfaces didn’t really allow to input multiple entries at the same time but rather one-by-one. They were also using batches for each lot of wood manufactured and batches needed to be created beforehand which was time consuming.

They had all the data available and this was coming straight from the production lines.

The solution was that they could copy the prepared data and paste it into the tool which then:

  1. Displays all open production orders from SAP via query production lots API to allow the user to select the correct production order
  2. Automatically in the background checks if batches exists and if not then create them via custom created API
  3. Make the inventory posting to SAP to adjust the consumed raw materials and create new produced finished or semifinished goods via the manufacturing API
  4. Enforce logic checks so that its not possible to post more outcome then a certain percentage of it exceeding the input etc.

In the end it worked very well and enabled to complete the manufacturing in few seconds instead of 30+ minutes of manual data entry and without mistakes in data integrity.