Business scenario

A practical business scenario demonstrating how SAP PI Channel jobs can be used to manage communication channels.

A large, multinational manufacturer interacts with business partners, clients, and suppliers in different geographic locations. The computers used by each party differs in hardware, operating system, and more often than not, both. Part of the interactions between these parties include secure data exchange to transmit critical business information. Given the differences in hardware and operating systems, the information is converted to the SAP Intermediate Document (IDoc) format for transferring data related to business transactions. The IDocs are generated in the sending database and are transmitted to the receiver, which in this case, is a SAP R/3 system.

In this scenario, only if files arrive with specific file names, such as ABC.txt, DEF.txt, and GHI.txt, should they be transformed by the process integrator into a single IDoc. To achieve this, the company leverages Event Driven Workload Automation in which an event rule is created that monitors the arrival of files. The action associated with the event rule is to open the sender communication channel. After the conversion to IDoc is complete, the process integrator removes the original source files. The removal of the files is detected by HCL Workload Automation and a job is submitted to close the sender channel until the next iteration of this same process.

There are several advantages to using the HCL Workload Automation plug-in for SAP PI Channel to control communication channels. For example, they can also be used when the backend SAP R/3 system is under maintenance. A job can be submitted into a job stream to stop the receiving channel and then reactivate it once the maintenance is complete.