Case Study: Integrating Magento 2 with SAP Business One (SAP B1) with MrLiving company

Having your business and management processes automated saves your time and hence money. In this article I will tell you about one of our customers MrLiving, a company focused on north Europe style sofas and how we have integrated their SAP B1 ERP system with the Magento 2 store.

Having your Magento 2 store integrated with ERP systems such as SAP Business One yields improvements in the management time and further business process automation. The issues when integrating Magento 2 and SAP Business One

Before we proceed to the case study, let me quickly outline the main problems with Magento 2 and SAP integration and the problems every business owner may face:

1. Getting started with SAP ERP. This one is because you are pretty much tied to the integrator you are working with. Transferring or setting up your business processes is a tedious task, especially if you have to consider the ecommerce platform such as Magento 2.
2. Looking for a solution that would respect your privacy and won’t process your data. Most of the integration solutions for Magento 2 and SAP are cloud hosted, meaning that the third-party has access and processes your data while transferring it. Which creates particular data leak risks for the business owners.
3. Finding the specialist who has knowledge in both SAP and Magento 2 systems. Which is not a simple task as most of the development agencies are targeted for particular projects, and having the development agency study or hire new employees for the project they are not familiar with will increase the project costs and may postpone the integration project as the team working on it will not have enough experience, along with the best practice know-how.
4. Having a deadline. This has been mentioned in the point above, however, having planned the launch of the store to a particular date considering the possible solutions often means losing time and money on every unexpected delay if the integration is not done properly.

How MrLiving have decided to go with Firebear Studio to integrate their Magento 2 with SAP

Here, at Firebear Studio we work with both Magento 2 and SAP B1 and have already successfully implemented several integration projects for our customers.

One of such customers is Eric, a software engineer working for MrLiving company, which specializes in furniture – the Europe-style sofas. For MrLiving and Eric we have performed the integration of SAP B1 and their Magento 2 to automate the process of synchronizing customers, products, and orders in both ways SAP-M2-SAP.

We have asked Eric why have they decided to work with Firebear Studio, which options they have, and what problems we have overcome together building this integration.

What’s your background?

I am a software engineer working for MrLiving; a local furniture company focused on north Europe styled sofas.

Our goal is to provide a great design sense and cost affordable products to customers.

What problem with your Magento 2 store and SAP B1 were you trying to solve?

Our legacy ERP neither derives the sales data easily nor customizes the business processes.

Therefore, we plan to migrate ERP to SAP B1 and want to integrate data with our EC platform M2 (Magento 2).

We need a solution to transport the sales data from M2 to SAP and vice versa in terms of the product data.

How was the problem affecting you?

We have almost a thousand products, and there are around a hundred orders produced from our website weekly.

We will need a lot of human efforts, e.g., EC assistants, to sync order data manually and frequently double-check if we cannot find a systems connector.

SAP B1 and the latest Magento 2 version are new to us.

We also need a domain expert familiar with both SAP B1 and M2 who can guide us on the integration journey.

What other possible solutions did you consider? (development agencies, competitors)

First of all, we tried to find a solution locally, but few SI can support both systems.

We searched the integrator on the internet and found three candidates with production-ready solutions, i.e., one German and two Indian system integration providers.

Why did you choose the Firebear SAP B1 connector?

We have listed the pros and cons table based on our concerning attributes, and Firebear earns the most pros.

The highest priority requirement is we won’t disclose customer data to 3rd-party services. The Firebear SAP B1 Integration is the only on-premise solution, and it is based on B1if and M2 extensions without any external server connection.

The other sweet feature is 100% open source and customizable. 

We can make changes on source by ourselves to fulfill our business logic.

Thanks to the kindly Firebear team member. 

They always open their minds to help us solve issues and give advice on UDF sync.

What would have happened if you had NOT purchased our solution?

We would have postponed the online schedule and kept seeking the other integration solution.

In the worst case, we would have abandoned this systems upgrade, reevaluated a new ERP, and replanned all schedules.

What risks did you consider?

The biggest challenge for us is to meet the schedule.

We have to complete the system migration during sales slack season, i.e., Feb, otherwise we need to postpone the change to next year.

Thanks to Firebear, they help us complete the most critical features on time and meet the migration schedule.

What reservations did you have?

If we failed to upgrade the systems, we would use the legacy systems for another year. 

What measurable benefits have you seen?

Firebear SAP B1 integrator helps us automatically sync hundreds of EC orders to SAP B1 weekly.

That means we can release a lot of routine human effort from data sync and focus on product promotion and customer service.

We can also easily collect all sales data from one back-end source timely

This helps us quickly figure out the sales data outline and make decisions according to data instantly.

Drawing the line, using Firebear Studio’s Magento 2 integration with SAP, you can quickly and reliably connect your SAP B1 ERP with your Magento 2 and Adobe commerce/on premise store’s store.

About Magento 2 and SAP integration solution

Now I would like to give you an example of what you, and your business can expect out of the box if the integration by Firebear Studio is decided upon:

1. Synchronization of products, customers, orders, deliveries, discounts, inventory data, categories from Magento 2 – SAP.
2. Use of B1IF official SAP data processing tools
3. On-premise solution, meaning no third party processing, you control your own data, we do not process it in any way.
4. Fully open-code solution which can be further adjusted and managed by your development team. Every piece of code is open, we do not use any code protection tools.

Here at Firebear Studio we have been offering Magento 2 and SAP Business One ERP integration services for over two years and have a number of happy customers who have automated their business processes and already implemented the integration.

The answers by one of our customers – MrLiving – company who have integrated their SAP B1 with Magento 2 give a nice example of how the work is done.

If you want to discuss your project for integrating Magento 2 with SAP B1, please contact us via chat or by submitting a request to Contact.