Customers often use several R/3 Systems. This could be due to organizational or business reasons (if a customer has several plants around the world, for example) or technical reasons (the data volume or system load is too large for a single R/3 System). In many cases, data has to be exchanged between these systems.

The decentralization of business applications – that is, implementing distributed business processes – can be practical for many reasons:

• Increasing market globalization results in physical separation of organizational units.

• Business processes are not limited to a single company, and customers and vendors are becoming increasingly involved.

• The performance of an R/3 System can be improved by distributing business applications.

To implement distributed business processes, it must be possible to exchange the data in a controlled manner and store it consistently. These tasks are performed by application link enabling (ALE), which integrates distributed business processes both between individual R/3 Systems and between R/3 Systems and non-SAP systems.

This document describes how to use BAPIs in order to distribute business processes using ALE. In particular, it deals with the process flow of communication using BAPIs and explains which steps are necessary to use BAPIs via ALE.

The target audience of this document consists of:

• BAPI developers who want to generate a BAPI-ALE interface for a BAPI

• SAP employees, partners, and customers who want to implement a distributed scenario using BAPIs and ALE services

To implement a BAPI via ALE, you need:

• Basic knowledge of the R/3 System

• Basic knowledge of BAPIs, as described in ‘BAPIs – Introduction and Overview’

• Knowledge of ALE

To develop a BAPI that can be used via ALE, you also need:

• Knowledge of the ABAP programming language and ABAP Workbench