Mavenlink and SAP S/4 HANA are both commercial systems that automate business processes. Mavenlink is a project management solution while SAP S/4 HANA rolls out entire ERP solutions. Integrating data between these two systems requires the use of the SAP Project Systems (PS) module. This article outlines the considerations for integrating a Mavenlink system with PS. PS is utilized to consolidate project and Work Breakdown Structure related data into other financial and reporting modules within an SAP solution such as Sales & Distribution (SD) or SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). SD will be a core component in this integration as well if utilized by the business to manage Sales Order information.
The team on this integration may encounter challenges as Mavenlink lends more flexibility to its end users than SAP PS can easily accommodate. For example, Mavenlink end users can drag/drop a task to any position within a WBS hierarchy, even after approving time & expense against the task. In SAP PS, the hierarchy cannot be rearranged easily once time or expense is posted against a WBS element. This scenario will require solutioning on both sides. The SAP interface will need to handle potential errors generated by the unfavorable re-positioning of a WBS element, and Mavenlink end users will need to be trained to avoid doing this. These considerations are important to mitigate the amount of manual effort to reconcile discrepancies between the systems.
The projects coming into SAP will likely have different financial implications; a milestone-based project, for instance, will need to behave differently than a prepaid or T&M project as time and expense are posted against it. A more complicated project may contain top-level WBS elements with different financial implications - this would be the case if the business represents multiple SKUs of different billing/revenue types as a single project. Solutioning this scenario may require the use of DIP profiles to define the different billing conditions for the WBS elements.
PS consultants will need to work closely with business analysts, ABAPers, and SD consultants to successfully implement this integration. If you would like to dive a bit deeper into the technical requirements around this integration, please read the second article of this series Technical Considerations for Integrating Mavenlink and SAP.