In the era of digital transformation, enterprises are leveraging diverse data landscapes to gain actionable insights and streamline business processes. SAP Process Integration (PI) / Process Orchestration (PO) has long been the backbone for enterprise application integration, connecting SAP and non-SAP systems seamlessly. On the other hand, SAP Data Intelligence serves as an advanced data orchestration platform enabling data integration, management, and governance across complex hybrid environments.
Integrating SAP PI/PO with SAP Data Intelligence offers organizations the best of both worlds: robust process integration with cutting-edge data orchestration and analytics capabilities. This article explores the approaches, benefits, and best practices for integrating SAP PI/PO with SAP Data Intelligence.
¶ Overview: SAP PI/PO and SAP Data Intelligence
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SAP PI/PO: Middleware platform designed to enable process integration, message transformation, and protocol bridging in enterprise landscapes. It handles synchronous and asynchronous communication and supports diverse adapters for various protocols.
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SAP Data Intelligence: Cloud-native platform designed to integrate, manage, and orchestrate data pipelines across heterogeneous systems, including on-premise and cloud, structured and unstructured data sources. It focuses on data discovery, quality, governance, and machine learning lifecycle management.
- SAP PI/PO excels at reliable, transactional process integration with SAP ERP, CRM, and third-party applications.
- SAP Data Intelligence extends capabilities for data-centric processes like data ingestion, metadata management, data transformation, and advanced analytics.
- Real-time operational data integration feeding data lakes or analytics platforms.
- End-to-end orchestration from transactional system events to data science pipelines.
- Hybrid integration combining classic application integration with data pipeline automation.
¶ 1. Using Standard Protocols and Adapters
SAP PI/PO supports various adapters (SOAP, REST, IDoc, JMS, OData, etc.) that can communicate directly with SAP Data Intelligence APIs or services.
- REST Adapter: SAP Data Intelligence exposes REST APIs for triggering data pipelines or retrieving metadata. PI/PO REST adapter can call these services.
- SOAP Adapter: For legacy or specific web services exposed by Data Intelligence.
- IDoc/RFC Adapters: When transactional data needs to be exchanged.
Leverage event-driven architecture where SAP PI/PO captures business events (e.g., purchase orders, deliveries) and forwards them to SAP Data Intelligence for further processing and analytics.
- Use JMS or message queues as intermediaries.
- Use SAP Data Intelligence’s event-driven pipelines to consume PI/PO messages.
¶ 3. Data Replication and ETL
Use SAP Data Intelligence to orchestrate data extraction from SAP systems via PI/PO or direct connectors and process data for analytics.
- PI/PO acts as a source of cleansed and transformed business data.
- Data Intelligence performs advanced ETL, enrichment, and routing to downstream systems like SAP HANA, Data Lakes, or third-party BI tools.
¶ Key Considerations and Best Practices
¶ Authentication and Security
- Use OAuth2, SSL/TLS, and certificate-based authentication for secure communication.
- Ensure user and role management aligns across platforms for auditability.
- Establish canonical data models in PI/PO to standardize messages before sending to Data Intelligence.
- Leverage Data Intelligence’s metadata management capabilities to track data lineage.
¶ Monitoring and Error Handling
- Combine PI/PO’s message monitoring with Data Intelligence pipeline monitoring for end-to-end visibility.
- Implement retry and alerting mechanisms on both sides.
- Design asynchronous, event-driven communication for high throughput.
- Use batch processing in Data Intelligence pipelines where real-time is not mandatory.
¶ Versioning and Change Management
- Maintain version control of interfaces and pipelines.
- Test integration flows in sandbox environments before production rollout.
Sales Order Processing Pipeline
- SAP ERP system sends sales order data as IDocs to SAP PI/PO.
- PI/PO processes and transforms the IDocs to a canonical XML format.
- Using the REST adapter, PI/PO sends the transformed message to a SAP Data Intelligence pipeline endpoint.
- Data Intelligence orchestrates further enrichment, validation, and loads the data into an analytical data store.
- The results feed predictive analytics or machine learning models to optimize sales forecasting.
Integrating SAP PI/PO with SAP Data Intelligence unlocks powerful possibilities for enterprises to combine traditional process integration with modern data orchestration and analytics. By leveraging each platform’s strengths and adhering to best practices around security, data modeling, and monitoring, organizations can build scalable, resilient, and insightful integration landscapes.
As SAP evolves its intelligent enterprise strategy, the synergy between SAP PI/PO and SAP Data Intelligence will become increasingly vital for organizations striving to be data-driven and agile.