Integration with Third-Party Systems Using ENP

Use

Enhanced notification processing (ENP) enables you to flexibly control and document the data flow in production in connection with various destination systems, for example, with Web services. In this way, you can connect a third-party system (such as SAP ME) to PCo and transfer data from machine level to the desired SAP ME activity using Web service calls. This makes it possible, for example, starting from PCo, to call a Web service provided by SAP ME, evaluate the result of the call, and then, depending on the results of the Web service call, call an additional Web service or write data back to a source system.

SAP delivers the standard enhancement Destination System Calls with Response Processing for enhanced notification processing with which you can execute one or multiple destination system calls and with which you can write back the results of the calls to the data source of the agent instance or other agent instances. This covers the most common requirements in communication between data sources of production and business systems.

If you want to implement requirements that go beyond the function scope of the SAP standard enhancement, you can implement a customer-owned enhancement. PCo provides an interface for this purpose that you can implement. The notification enhancement is mapped in the form of a destination system so that the enhancement is called as part of a notification process.

Enhanced notification processing enables you to do the following:

  • You can call one or more destination systems one after the other in any order. This might be, for example, a regular Web service or a RESTful Web service.

  • You can call mass-enabled destination systems (Web services) for multiple object instances, for example, for multiple SFCs of the SAP ME system.

  • You can assign the output expressions of a notification to the parameters of a Web service statically or dynamically.

  • You can perform a program-controlled evaluation of the results of a destination system call and react to the results accordingly.

  • After a notification message is received, the destination system can send information to a specific agent instance and update, for example, a tag value in the source system.

  • You can send data to a destination system of the type ODBC destination system. (See ODBC Destination System.)

Prerequisites

If you want to create your own implementation, the following prerequisites must be fulfilled:

  • You are using PCo 15.1 or higher.

  • You are using .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) 4.0 or higher.

  • You are using a .NET development environment, such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 or higher.

  • You have .NET development experience, preferably C#.

  • You have experience in using Web services.

Integration

To facilitate the implementation of these functions, the enhanced notification processing framework has a library with help methods with which you can call Web services or agents.

If you have implemented a customer-owned implementation and then made the required settings in PCo, this enhancement is called automatically when notification messages are processed. (See also: Process with Enhanced Notification Processing (ENP).)

See Also

Process with Enhanced Notification Processing (ENP)

Destination System Calls with Response Processing

For more information about the integration with third-party systems in connection with enhanced notification processing (ENP), see the Implementation Guide for Enhanced Notification Processing (ENP) on SAP Help Portal under https://help.sap.com/pcoInformation published on SAP site. The Implementation Guide also contains example implementations.