8 ways Salesforce integration with SAP accelerates business transformation

Today’s competitive economy cannot rely on conventional systems due to their obsolete nature. They demand a more flexible, reliable, stable, and revolutionary operating model that supports sourcing customer data to identify opportunities, forging productive customer relationships, generating revenue, following up with clients, and closing business deals.

Enterprises that employ the Salesforce CRM platform on their frontends access multitudes of functionalities that ensure seamless management of critical business functions. On the contrary, businesses that use SAP as their enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform unlock end-to-end automation to manage and maintain business processes and customer data.

However, with Salesforce SAP integration, organizations can now leverage the best of both the worlds. Enterprises using the Salesforce platform can now use the real-time automation features of SAP to transfer customer data to their CRM, improve process efficiency, and derive actionable customer insights.

A robust Salesforce SAP integration improves the coordination between sales, finance, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and customer support processes and provides a 360-degree view of their customers to better customer service and elevate profit margins.

Why Salesforce integration with SAP?

Salesforce is the #1 CRM platform globally, with millions of subscribers and tens of thousands of companies worldwide. SAP is a leading ERP platform with millions of cloud users. Being prominent names in the IT ecosystem, integrating Salesforce with SAP connects your frontend with your backend and drives true digital transformation. A Salesforce SAP integration drives business efficiency and betters coordination between sales, accounting, manufacturing, distribution, and customer support departments.

Organizations that integrate Salesforce to their SAP platform achieve smooth and seamless data handling and management. On the contrary, enterprises that integrate their Salesforce platform with SAP ERP gain valuable insights about the customers through real-time data automation.

The benefits of Salesforce SAP integration

Enterprises opting for Salesforce integration with the SAP platform can achieve complete automation of business operations. The Salesforce CRM tracks your frontend information like customer and sales data. SAP handles backend information like customer purchase history, inventory data, financial details, and billing and shipping-related info. When synchronized together, an application can share customer-related data like order history, account information like phone number, address, and email id, preventing data duplication and generating new value.

The following are some of the benefits of Salesforce & SAP integration.

#1: Achieves higher business efficiency

With customer sales documents scattered in Salesforce and SAP, processing orders, managing inventory, and creating invoices becomes a slow and tedious task. Synchronizing these platforms removes all order management inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the cash flow workflow, eliminates time delays, and allows seamless management of the order fulfillment, invoicing, and delivery process.

#2: Ensures data consistency

Manual data entry in two different Salesforce and SAP systems is prone to human errors, causes an imbalance in data figures, and leads to data duplication. Salesforce SAP integration enables data consistency. Entering customer information means similar data being automatically utilized for various business processes, eliminating the need for dual data entry and decreasing data redundancies and errors.

#3: Deliver personalized customer experiences

Salesforce integration with SAP ERP provides a 360-degree view of your clients and customers, from purchasing frequencies, expectations, preferences, order history, and account information to transactions all with a single system. When you have deeper insights and intelligence on what your customers’ demands and needs, you can easily create tailored solutions that drive customer loyalty and support.

#4: Increases selling opportunities and allows order processing in real-time

Salesforce integration with SAP allows for instantaneous, effortless and optimized order processing, invoicing, and delivery. When the order is closed in Salesforce CRM, it is updated on the SAP ERP platform automatically. Salesforce SAP integration becomes more important for businesses with customized pricing norms where discounts are based on order quantity and product combinations. Such platform synchronization reduces the risk of price misquoting, increases sales productivity, and boosts profit margins.

#5: Practice an agile business environment

Salesforce SAP integration puts customer data to good use in your company’s value chain. It allows you to get a complete view of your customers, enables you to predict customer demands ahead of time, quickly adjust to the changing market conditions, accelerate the development-to-order process, and communicate with your customers more effectively. All of these actions serve as building blocks for an agile business environment.

#6: Accelerate cash flow

Salesforce SAP integration helps with cash reserves as well. The synchronized system quickly identifies overdue accounts, sends alerts, and helps optimize the cash flow system. It helps financial managers raise invoices immediately, collect cash as per the payment terms after closing a sale, gain insights to recognize cash flow accurately, and helps to meet monthly financial goals.

#7: Boosts ROIs

To earn profits, you need to charge the right price and keep operating costs under control. As enterprises leverage the combined functionalities of Salesforce & SAP integration, it will make business processes effective and efficient, enhance competitive positioning, and serve customers the way they want to be served. Salesforce integration with SAP shortens order processing times, leads to faster fulfillment, and reduces human-made errors. All such efforts contribute directly to increasing sales figures and boosting ROIs.

#8: Improves customer support standards

Customer service agents need complete visibility of the customers’ data, including order history, payments returns, delivery, dispatches, and purchasing behavior, in order to track down and solve their issues. Identifying the correct information from two systems hampers quality customer support. With Salesforce SAP integration, reps can find all related information on one system, improving query processing rates, bringing down the cost of sales and improving competitive positioning.

Salesforce SAP integration best practices

Using our experience and expertise in Salesforce integration with SAP, we’ve compiled the Salesforce SAP integration best practices to allow a seamless, efficient, and flexible integration. These include:

Best Practice #1: Hybrid Connectors

Ensure all the Salesforce & SAP integration data, including all the credentials details, transformation information, etc. is stored at the company premises. However, logical mapping on how to integrate SAP with salesforce should be present on the cloud. It makes it easy for enterprises to adopt this integrated model with added security and flexibility.

Best Practice #2: Governor’s limit

For a single work request, developers perform multiple API calls usually. So, developers need to use the API calls wisely since Salesforce has enforced Governor’s limit on API calls that can be performed on a daily basis. Therefore, developers must use data sync and wherever possible by employing the parent and child records in a single API call to reduce the number of REST API calls conducted.

Best Practice #3: Standard APIs

Try to use standard APIs, instead of custom APIs, wherever possible to eliminate any impact on the existing solution and save time on the implementation and integration.

Best Practice #4: Pre-packed templates

Use pre-built and reusable integrations to save time and money, accelerate the execution of business functions across multiple systems, applications, and platforms and improve integration reliability.

Best Practice #5: Ensure flexible integrations

Salesforce SAP integration should be flexible to scale to the future complexity needs without disrupting the current operations. The integration points should allow bi-directional data sync from Salesforce to SAP and vice-versa.

Best Practice #6: Define the use cases

To do this, you’ll need an experienced Integration Engineer, pre-built templates, and best practices. Once all your use cases are integrated and ready to run, connect them with additional endpoints, data points, workflows, real-time customized integration without any coding.

Best Practice #7: Hire Salesforce integration with SAP specialists

While it might seem like a no-brainer to you, getting an experienced and versatile Salesforce SAP integration expert will help you smoothly integrate the two most powerful platforms, Salesforce and SAP, boost business productivity, and achieve competitive advantage.

Make most of your Salesforce & SAP integration 

The individual benefits of Salesforce and SAP combined to form a Salesforce SAP integration helps organizations to use powerful and vital customer data and turn it into actionable insights and solutions. Salesforce integration with SAP gets all the decision-makers under one roof using a single system with multiple functionalities, allowing leads to take crucial business decisions faster while streamlining business processes.