Innovation & Technology

About Event-Driven Architecture and what it means in SAP world

Build an end-to-end event-driven landscape with SAP Event Mesh.
Jan De Roeck consultant bij Amista
Jan De Roeck
Amista Consultant at work

Introduction

Today, most organizations worldwide are undergoing the much-talked ‘digital transformation’. With that comes a complex IT challenge in your organization, as traditional architectures simply cannot handle the performance in real-time. The more data companies generate, the harder it is to manage. If you are one of them, Event-Driven Architecture can address a lot of the pain points.

The promise of an Event-Driven Architecture is to make businesses interact more in real-time in operations and customer interactions. This is done by enabling every software component in your landscape to publish and subscribe to event notifications in real-time. An event is nothing more than a significant change of state to an object within an enterprise system: a record is created, modified, or deleted. Example: A decision is made in your ERP system to increase the number of bottles in a standard carton. Event notifications are instantly published and fired to the downstream applications touching systems and processes across production, logistics, finance, marketing, sales, etc.

What it means in the SAP world

In SAP-driven organizations, event-driven architecture can be enabled with SAP Event Mesh – a cloud-based event broker offered by SAP on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). This SAP Technology is rather new and it enables asynchronous messaging between the publisher and the subscriber of the events. Asynchronous messaging enables decoupling the different systems in your landscape through which you can avoid complex dependencies on multiple systems if something changes in one of your systems. So it speeds up scalability and agility in your processes.

Most SAP S/4HANA modules can publish standard events to SAP Event Mesh. With the help of installing an add-on called Event Enablement, event-driven architecture can also be orchestrated on SAP ECC seamlessly.

SAP Event Mesh allows events from one application to be routed and received by any other application, no matter where the applications are deployed (on-premise, private cloud, public cloud). Events are associated with a ‘topic’ to achieve the publish-subscribe model. Topics are managed through queue subscriptions. SAP or non-SAP applications can subscribe to the topic via queue subscriptions to access messages from the event source. SAP Event Mesh enables a sending application to publish messages to a topic that directly sends the message to the queue to which it is bound.

SAP Event Mesh

Real use-case implemented by Amista

One of our customers’ subsidiaries sells products to healthcare professionals. They have set up a B2B website where a healthcare professional can place a sales order for a certain product, and it gets created in the backend SAP ERP system. Any changes made on the sales order transaction by the back-office team are notified in real-time via the events published by ECC towards SAP Event Mesh and in turn SAP Event Mesh routes these events to a webhook hosted on the B2B platform running on AWS public cloud. Also, whenever a shipment tracking number is attached to this sales order, the B2B website is updated with this information via an event so that the customer can track the delivery information.

The ERP system in this scenario is an SAP ECC system where we had to install an add-on called Event Enablement which publishes events from ECC into SAP Event Mesh via REST messaging. The target application which listens to these events has subscribed to the queue configured on EM and listens to the events via AMQP protocol.

As soon as an event is noticed by the website, it reacts immediately by calling an SAP API to fetch the whole information of the event to know what exactly has been modified.

SAP event mesh

Without a direct integration between the backend system and the B2B platform, changes in the backend system are reflected on the B2B platform in real-time. Whenever a modification happens in the backend system, the B2B platform will be notified through SAP Event Mesh and will be able to decide whether the change is relevant and/or if this change needs to be reacted on.

SAP Cloud platform

To summarize, the 3 key features of SAP Event Mesh

  1. Connect applications, services and systems across different landscapes
  2. Build applications and extensions that can react to events from SAP S/4HANA out-of-the-box
  3. Communicate reliably at scale


Connect, empower and accelerate your Intelligent Enterprise. Build an end-to-end event-driven landscape with SAP Event Mesh and Amista!
For more information about how to set up your SAP Event Mesh service instance, contact us.