Silent Commerce for the Electronic Market Place pharma mall

pharma mall is a joined subsidiary company of the pharmaceutic articles producers Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis and Schering. The enterprise operates a web based order platform for pharmaceutic products that is used by numerous clinics and supply pharmacies.

The Starting Situation

pharma mall recognised that the optimisation of B2B processes offers enormous savings potentials . clavis was assigned the task to eliminate manual operation steps and thus to reduce the data entry effort significantly. Printout, fax, manual data input and order filing, respectively order confirmation were to be replaced by a fully automated silent commerce process.

The Implementation

All pharma mall suppliers use SAP R/3 as their ERP system . Therefore clavis decided to implement the SAP Business Connector for the realisation of the customer concept. The usage of the SAP Business Connector offers the following advantages:

  • low development cost, because of 'grafic programming'
  • no additional license costs, for these are already included in the MySAP.com license
  • subsequent transfer into SAP XI, because XI uses the same technical architecture (XML)

In the following project phase the single process steps had to be mapped into the system. For the order entry as a part of the supplier system a synchronous process was chosen. That means, when an order entry is received the Business Connector invokes a BAPI function module per RFC call and the calling process enters into a wait mode until it gets the response of the function module. In case of a successful process an order number is generated, otherwise an error message is displayed. That way the customer gets an immediate feedback whether his order was entered successfully. A continuous monitoring of the IDoc in tray as well as a manual post processing of inaccurate order entries is no more required.

Any follow-on posting and master data synchronisation are installed as asynchronous processes. With help of look-up functions all needed XML structures can be easily loaded from the SAP system. To transfer customer specific data (so called Z-fields) we have enhanced the IDoc definitions by particular data records. These additional data are subsequently processed by the Business Connector in the same way as the standard fields.

The Effect

Now the following processes are automated via silent commerce:

  • an purchase order is entered in the ERP system of a customer
  • the order is forwarded electronically to pharma mall
  • at pharma mall data are converted if necessary, e.g. the web shop item number to the suppliers item number
  • the purchase order is transferred electronically to the respective supplier's ERP system and a customer order is created.

Thus a significant effort und cost reduction has been achieved. The installed version of the Business Connectors (4.7) runs stable , even in a system operating at full capacity, and provides as a standard feature already an encompassing logging and analysis functions that even can be expanded if required.

The Prospect

The optimising solution installed at pharma mall is independent of industry branches and can be implemented, wherever order processing between a customer and a supplier system is the matter. To take advantage of an existing license, at least one SAP R/3 system must be involved at either of the parties. The low development costs and the high saving potentials by using the SAP Business Connector, consequently lead to a short term return of investment.