Real-time SAP, SuccessFactors and Workday data inside your Agents and workflows

[Enevoldsen]

The Zero Copy Connector for ERP reads it live and writes back to SAP, straight from Flow Designer, remote tables, scripted APIs, and AI Agents. No middleware to stand up, no copy to keep in sync.

If you have ever built a workflow that needed data out of SAP, you know how the story usually goes. The data lives behind a protocol most ServiceNow developers don't touch every day. Someone spins up an integration layer, a batch job copies records on a schedule, and now you own a second copy of the truth that is stale the moment it lands. Half the effort is the workflow. The other half is plumbing you did not want to build.

The Zero Copy Connector for ERP (ZCC for ERP) takes the plumbing off your plate. Instead of moving ERP data into ServiceNow and hoping it stays current, you define the business entities you care about as models, then use those models as native building blocks on the platform. The data stays in the system of record. Your workflow reads it, and where it makes sense, writes back to it, live. It is part of the Workflow Data Fabric portfolio.

What you actually work with

The core building block is a model. A model represents an entity such as a purchase order, a vendor, or an employee position, and defines the fields you want to read or write. You build models in Model Manager, which is configuration rather than code. Under the hood a model can be backed by a SAP table, a BAPI, a REST call, an IDOC or an OData service, but you stop thinking in those terms once the model exists. That is the whole point of the abstraction: you work with a clean business entity instead of a 4,500-item BAPI catalogue.

Each model supports read, create, or update operations, one of each per model. If you need two different field sets for the same entity, you clone the model and adjust the copy without touching the original.

Once a model exists, you have a few ways to use it. In Flow Designer it shows up as an action, so an ERP read or write becomes a step you drag into a flow with no scripting. Remote tables let the data appear in list views and forms as if it were a local table, except every row is queried live from the source system on demand and nothing is stored in ServiceNow. That is the zero-copy path. When you do want the data to live in ServiceNow, for reporting, search, or performance, you can schedule an ETL extraction into a platform table instead. That is a deliberate choice for cases where real-time is not the priority. For anything that needs more control, model operations are callable from a scripted API. And because models surface as actions, an AI Agent can read or update the data as part of a larger agentic flow.

Which systems it connects to, and how

SAP is where ZCC for ERP is deepest. SAP ECC, on NetWeaver 7.31 or later, and S/4HANA, connect over multiple protocols, and which one you use depends on the entity rather than a single default. BAPI is SAP's remote function call interface and handles most create, read, and update operations. It runs through a MID Server using the SAP-certified Java Connector, with no inbound ports opened and no change to the SAP core, and it is on-premise only. OData v2 is the REST-based path, and for S/4HANA Cloud it connects directly over HTTPS with no MID Server at all. When you build custom models for S/4HANA, prefer the S/4HANA-native OData APIs where they exist. Between the two you have more than 4,500 BAPIs and over 300 OData services to model against.

It is not only SAP. ZCC for ERP also connects to SuccessFactors and Workday, aimed at HR scenarios where you want live people data inside HRSD without syncing the HR system into ServiceNow tables. SuccessFactors connects over OData v2 and fits onboarding and offboarding flows that read live position, org structure, and employment status, or a manager approval that checks employee data at the moment of the request instead of from a nightly copy. Workday connects over REST and suits HR service delivery and onboarding automation that reads live worker data to drive provisioning tasks on ServiceNow. In both cases the pattern matches the SAP one: the workflow lives on ServiceNow, the record stays in the HR system, and ZCC for ERP is the live link between them.

Access everywhere is governed by the account the connection uses, so each system's own authorisation model is respected. For the current, authoritative list of supported systems, protocols, and constraints, check the supported systems article in the hub.

A worked example: onboarding a vendor into S/4HANA

There is a full write-up of this use case, stage by stage, with the real-world variants for high-volume shared services and for regulated industries where the audit trail and bank verification genuinely matter: Onboard vendors into S/4HANA using Zero Copy Connector for ERP. The same shape, read live where you need context and write back under governed approval, applies to plenty of other builds: reconciling CMDB assets against SAP Asset Accounting, validating a cost center before a request is submitted, or reading live worker data from Workday to drive an onboarding.

Where to start

We have pulled everything into one place: the Zero Copy Connector for ERP Community Hub.

https://www.servicenow.com/community/workflow-data-fabric-articles/zero-copy-connector-for-erp-commu...

It has a one-minute overview video, the quick-start guide, setup walkthroughs for both BAPI and OData, the Models 101 breakdown of platform versus ERP models, guides for remote tables, extraction, custom models and scripted APIs, a content packs overview, troubleshooting and an FAQ, and a link to the fundamentals course on ServiceNow University.

If you just want your hands on it, start with the quick-start guide. It takes you from install, through connecting to your ERP system, to a working first use case in a single article. Once you have that, the rest of the hub is there when a specific question comes up.