After SAP released C/4HANA in June this year, some consultants left messages on the background of wechat public account, asking how C/4HANA could be combined with SAP’s digital core S/4HANA system, so as to open up the front and back end business of enterprises and help enterprises realize digital transformation.

Some consultants asked if there are any specific cases to reflect the solution of front-end and back-end integration. Just as SAP Chengdu Research Institute Customer Experience Digital Innovation Space has recently done a prototype development connecting C/4HANA and S/4HANA. Here I would like to share with you.

The coding part of the prototype development was done by Wen Aviva, Wang Leo, and Jerry at Digital Innovation Space, with the front-end page design and art being overseen by Jane. Mr. Wang and Mr. Wen are responsible for designing the use scenarios of the prototype. During the design process, they also received help from other product managers of SAP Chengdu Research Institute. I would like to express my gratitude.

In a word, the scenario of intelligent service is to make it easy for users to use the integrated service process provided by C/4HANA and S/4HANA through wechat as the client. Among them, we choose SAP Cloud for Customer(C4C) in the SUITE C/4HANA.

Introduction to prototype development scenarios

Let’s start with a concrete scenario.

1. A customer named Zeng Hairui is the production director of Green Seed Group. Due to the business needs of the company, he ordered a robotic arm of Blue Sky Robot Co., LTD on the Internet and followed the official account of Blue Sky Robot Co., LTD.

According to the information maintained on Zeng Hairui’s order, such as name and mobile phone number, once Zeng Hairui followed the wechat official account, the message server of the wechat official account would receive a SUBSCRIBE event, which triggered the creation of customer master data in SAP system through the programming on the message server.

Depending on the actual situation of the enterprise, if you want to create wechat trigger customer master data in C/4HANA C4C, you can refer to Jerry’s public account article C4C and wechat integration series tutorials and Jerry’s colleague Li Sean’s blog:

Integration of WeChat and C4C Service Ticket on HTML5 Client

If you want to put the customer master data in S/4HANA, then expose the creation function of THE S/4HANA customer master data to the wechat message server through Cloud Connector. For details, please refer to Jerry’s two articles:

  • Call functions in ABAP on-premise system using Java+SAP Cloud Platform +SAP Cloud Connector
  • Consume ABAP on-premise OData services in the CloudFoundry environment of SAP cloud platform

2. After the blue Sky robot staff wrapped up the robot arm, they attached a QR code on the case containing the serial number of the robot arm. Each arm sold corresponds to an Equipment instance in THE S/4HANA background, and the serial number is a field on the Equipment.

When Zeng received the robot arm, he scanned the QR code on the package with wechat, which triggered a pre-developed function of S/4HANA to complete the binding of the serial number of the robot arm to the user’s information, without the need for S/4HANA operators to manually enter the system.

After scanning the QR code, Zeng clicked the “Appointment” menu on wechat and made a reservation for a blue Sky robot technician to install the robot arm at his home.

3. On the wechat booking page, Zeng’s current address is automatically recognized by GPS, and of course he can also change it manually. Because our developers did the test in the company, the booking address below shows the actual address of the digital innovation space of SAP Chengdu Research Institute:

The list of installation technicians displayed in Zeng hairui’s wechat was generated by calling C4C’s customer master data service. The service will automatically screen technicians in the C4C background who match The appointment time specified by Mr. Zeng and return them to wechat.

Zeng eventually chose li Xiaogang, a technician with the highest level of appearance, in the list of available technicians.

The name Li Xiaogang is not made up by us. In reality, it is Li Sean, a developer in THE C4C development team of SAP Chengdu Research Institute, who is Jerry’s colleague.

In addition to cooking, Li xiaogang enjoys playing darts and reading Buddhist sutras.

After Mr. Zeng selected Mr. Li as an installation technician on wechat, the C4C app on Mr. Li’s phone received a prompt message:

You have a new work order. The user has booked door-to-door installation service, please check the details of the work order in time.

Li Xiaogang clicked the message prompt to enter the work order details page of the C4C mobile application and saw the installation details of the mechanical arm.

On the date of Zeng hairui’s appointment, li Xiaogang could click the “Share your location” button on the bottom toolbar of the C4C work order interface to initiate a real-time location sharing to Zeng before he left.

At this time, Zeng Hairui can check Li Xiaogang’s real-time position at any time in wechat.

5. After li Xiaogang arrived at the scene and completed the installation of the mechanical arm, he clicked the button “Push bill” on his C4C mobile phone application to push the bill details of the installation fee to Zeng Hairui’s wechat. In addition to this installation cost, the bill also includes the information related to the maintenance and Cross Selling of the robot arm in THE S/4HANA system, such as the nozzle washing gun matching the robot arm.

Li Xiaogang and Ceng Hairui face to face communication, Ceng Hairui decided to buy the nozzle washing gun. Therefore, Before pushing bills, Li Xiaogang selected the check box in front of the nozzle washing gun in the relevant product area and then clicked the button of “pushing bills”.

After zeng received the bill on wechat, he paid it after confirming the information was correct. Of course, the payment here can also be integrated with the billing process of S/4HANA, but we did not do this prototype development.

6. Upon completion of payment, Zeng Hairui will see a questionnaire on the satisfaction of the installation service on his mobile phone.

Here, we directly use the data model of S/4HANA Survey to expose the questionnaire submission function for wechat application consumption through Cloud Connector.

The results were written into the database via S/4HANA’s Survey API after Zeng scored five star reviews on his wechat page.

For more details on submitting S/4HANA Survey data with ABAP code, refer to my blog:

Use ABAP code to fill CRM Survey question and submit

Introduction to prototype development architecture

The following is an architecture diagram of the intelligent service prototype development.

1. The white legend represents the development content made for this prototype by the developers of SAP Chengdu Research Institute digital Innovation Space, which includes:

  • The new code, such as the C4C and S/4 API endpoint in the figure, is the API we created in the Netweaver background.
  • New configurations, such as some Destination configurations created on the SAP cloud platform.
  • New data models, such as CDS View created in S/4HANA, are used to store Survey results submitted by users, and self-develop various reports with the help of the powerful real-time data analysis function of CDS View itself.

For more details on rendering S/4HANA Survey results with our own CDS View and foreground interface, please refer to my blog:

Develop your own Chart to visualize your CRM Survey result

2. The light green legend represents the message server of the wechat public account of Blue Sky Robot Company, which is deployed on ali Cloud platform.

3. Dark green legends represent standard features in SAP products.

  • Account Management: After following wechat official accounts, Zeng Hairui generated a master customer data in C4C using OData service provided by C4C Account Maangement.
  • Service Ticket: We used the Service Ticket model to realize the work order received by Li Xiaogang and the bill received by Zeng Hairui.
  • Due to the prototype development, for the sake of simplicity, we did not use the billing solution integrated with S/4HANA for C4C’s billing requirements.
  • **Product Master: **S/4HANA material Master data is synchronized to C4C through HANA Cloud Integration for use by C4C work orders and bills.

4. Gray legend represents SAP products used in this prototype development:

  • C4C
  • S/4HANA
  • SAP Cloud Connector
  • SAP Cloud Platform

Technically speaking, the time sequence interaction between the four systems of customer Zeng Hairui, technician Li Xiaogang, C4C and S/4HANA is shown in the figure below:

If you would like more technical details on this prototype development, please contact me. Thanks for reading.

Read more

  • SAP S4CRM vs C4C, Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu?
  • SAP Chengdu C4C Xiao Li Tanhua: Fiori Design Guidelines
  • SAP Cloud for Customer The unique features of SAP UI5
  • Design and implementation of SAP Cloud for Customer Extensibility
  • SAP mobile App solution one: HTML5 app + Cordova = platform-specific hybrid app
  • Application of machine learning in SAP Cloud for Customer
  • SAP hana C / 4 exactly which products include: zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/45188119

For more of Jerry’s original articles, please follow the public account “Wang Zixi “: