Sample Integration Flow Use Case

The Sample Integration Flow use case describes the inbound and outbound data flow.

This section contains an example use case so that the overall data flow (both inbound and outbound) can be explained.

Let us say Customer ABC Inc is using the below systems for a Procure to Pay flow:

• ServiceNow’s application for
• Self Service Procurement (Shopping Hub)
• Purchase Requisition to PO Flow (Procurement Workspace)
• SAP ECC for
• Sending POs to Supplier
• Recording Receipts
• Creating Supplier Invoice by matching to the POs
• Payment to Supplier
• Clearing the payments in Bank Statement

To achieve the above use case, the customer will need to follow multiple steps:

Step 1 – Install ServiceNow Applications.

• Implement ServiceNow’s Shopping Hub and Procurement Workspace where
• Employees can use Shopping Hub to create Purchase Requisition and sourcing requests
• Fulfillers can convert the SRs into PRs and PRs into POs
• Ability to push the POs created in SPO into SAP ECC
• Continue to use System of record of SAP ECC for
• Ingesting POs from ServiceNow
• Recording Receipts
• Creating Supplier Invoice by matching to the POs
• Payment to Supplier
• Clearing the payments in Bank Statement

Step 2 – Primary data.

• To create a purchase requisition in ServiceNow, the following information is required:
• Supplier
• Supplier Product (setting up supplier product requires product category and product model)
• Contract
• Delivery Address
• Accounts (Capex/Opex)
• Legal Entity
• Employee
• The above primary data should have a source of truth system – meaning any new record creation or updates to the existing records will be done in that respective system and then the data will be pushed into the third-party system.
• Out of the box integration flows with SAP ECC and SAP S4 HANA are built with the following assumptions:
• Source of truth will be SAP system for the following primary entities:
• Product Category and Product Model
• Delivery Address (mapped to plant location)
• GL Accounts
• Purchasing Org
• Cost Center
• Purchase Group
• Legal Entity/Company Code
• Currencies/FX Rate
• Payment Term
• Supplier (if no SLO is installed)
• primary data needs to be synced periodically to ensure that the latest and updated primary data becomes available in ServiceNow application. This is ensured by:
• Building Jobs which can be scheduled to be run at various intervals like every hour or every day or any other time frame as required by customer
• These jobs will have an ability to pull the data incrementally or full pull
• Underlying logic in the job will be to call the respective primary data integration hub action

Step 3 – Transaction data.

• Once the record (like PO) is created in ServiceNow then the same needs to be pushed into SAP ECC or SAP S4 HANA because as per the use case the downstream processing needs to happen in SAP ECC or SAP S4 HANA
• To achieve this the out of the box integration flows provide
• Sub-flows which contain the logic of when to trigger the integration (like as soon as ordered or approved or any other state)
• Sub-flows also take the SPO PO Payload data and convert it into the payload required by the integration hub action and pass the data to integration hub action
• Integration Hub action saves the record in the SAP system and gets back the ERP number and ERP Line number and stamp it back on SPO PO (for a happy flow)
• For an error flow the error message from SAP system is captured by the Integration Hub Action and create a task on the transaction record and assign it to a user so that the user can review, correct the data, and resubmit the same for integration
• If the SAP system is down for patching and say 50 POs get created in that time – then it may not be easy to open each PO and re-submit for integration. In such a case the job is provided which when run will pick all POs in error status and trigger the integration