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This is a guest post by Siva Manickam and Prahalathan M from Vyaire Medical Inc.
Vyaire Medical Inc. is a global company, headquartered in suburban Chicago, focused exclusively on supporting breathing through every stage of life. Established from legacy brands with a 65-year history of pioneering breathing technology, the company’s portfolio of integrated solutions is designed to enable, enhance, and extend lives.
At Vyaire, our team of 4,000 pledges to advance innovation and evolve what’s possible to ensure every breath is taken to its fullest. Vyaire’s products are available in more than 100 countries and are recognized, trusted, and preferred by specialists throughout the respiratory community worldwide. Vyaire has 65-year history of clinical experience and leadership with over 27,000 unique products and 370,000 customers worldwide.
Vyaire Medical’s applications landscape has multiple ERPs, such as SAP ECC, JD Edwards, Microsoft Dynamics AX, SAP Business One, Pointman, and Made2Manage. Vyaire uses Salesforce as our CRM platform and the ServiceMax CRM add-on for managing field service capabilities. Vyaire developed a custom data integration platform, iDataHub, powered by AWS services such as AWS Glue, AWS Lambda, and Amazon API Gateway.
In this post, we share how we extracted data from SAP ERP using AWS Glue and the SAP SDK.
Vyaire is working on deploying the field service management solution ServiceMax (SMAX, a natively built on SFDC ecosystem), offering features and services that help Vyaire’s Field Services team improve asset uptime with optimized in-person and remote service, boost technician productivity with the latest mobile tools, and deliver metrics for confident decision-making.
A major challenge with ServiceMax implementation is building a data pipeline between ERP and the ServiceMax application, precisely integrating pricing, orders, and primary data (product, customer) from SAP ERP to ServiceMax using Vyaire’s custom-built integration platform iDataHub.
Vyaire’s iDataHub powered by AWS Glue has been effectively used for data movement between SAP ERP and ServiceMax.
AWS Glue a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning (ML), and application development. It’s used in Vyaire’s Enterprise iDatahub Platform for facilitating data movement across different systems, however the focus for this post is to discuss the integration between SAP ERP and Salesforce SMAX.
The following diagram illustrates the integration architecture between Vyaire’s Salesforce ServiceMax and SAP ERP system.
In the following sections, we walk through setting up a connection to SAP ERP using AWS Glue and the SAP SDK through remote function calls. The high-level steps are as follows:
For this walkthrough, you should have the following:
For instructions for creating and connecting to an Amazon Linux 2 AMI EC2 instance, refer to Tutorial: Get started with Amazon EC2 Linux instances.
The reason we choose Amazon Linux EC2 is to compile the SDK and PyRFC in a Linux environment, which is compatible with AWS Glue.
At the time of writing this post, AWS Glue’s latest supported Python version is 3.7. Ensure that the Amazon EC2 Linux Python version and AWS Glue Python version are the same. In the following instructions, we install Python 3.7 in Amazon EC2; we can follow the same instructions to install future versions of Python.
To set up the SAP SDK, complete the following steps:
unzip nwrfcsdk.zip
Complete the following steps to create your wheel file:
Verify that the pyrfc-2.5.0-cp37-cp37m-linux_x86_64.whl wheel file is created as in the following screenshot in the PyRFC/dist folder. Note that you may see a different wheel file name based on the latest PyRFC version on GitHub.
To merge the SAP SDK files, complete the following steps:
Now you can update the rpath of the SAP SDK binaries using the PatchELF utility, a simple utility for modifying existing ELF executables and libraries.
Download and install PatchELF:
The following is a working sample code to test the connectivity between the SAP system and AWS Glue using the wheel file.
Complete the following steps to verify SAP connectivity:
AWS Glue facilitated the data extraction, transformation, and loading process from different ERPs into Salesforce SMAX to improve Vyaire’s products and its related information visibility to service technicians and tech support users.
In this post, you learned how you can use AWS Glue to connect to SAP ERP utilizing SAP SDK remote functions. To learn more about AWS Glue, check out AWS Glue Documentation.
Siva Manickam is the Director of Enterprise Architecture, Integrations, Digital Research & Development at Vyaire Medical Inc. In this role, Mr. Manickam is responsible for the company’s corporate functions (Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Integrations, Data Engineering) and produce function (Digital Innovation Research and Development).
Prahalathan M is the Data Integration Architect at Vyaire Medical Inc. In this role, he is responsible for end-to-end enterprise solutions design, architecture, and modernization of integrations and data platforms using AWS cloud-native services.
Deenbandhu Prasad is a Senior Analytics Specialist at AWS, specializing in big data services. He is passionate about helping customers build modern data architecture on the AWS Cloud. He has helped customers of all sizes implement data management, data warehouse, and data lake solutions.
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