Seaber is working at the forefront to drive the digital transformation of the shipping industry. As of this year, Seaber’s schedule planning software for bulk shipping offers an API integration with SAP.

At Seaber we know it is important to have working integrations with partnering technologies and systems our customers already have in use. By investing heavily on API integrations Seaber can simplify application development processes and easily connect and integrate with different applications. This way we can reduce error prone manual data inputs and save a great deal of time and money while easing the transition.

Read on to find out more about our most recent integration project with SAP below.‍

Let’s start with a short introduction to SAP. Standing for Systems Applications and Products, SAP is a German multinational software corporation that develops enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. The company is especially known for its widely-used Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software with some example business processes including Operations, Corporate Services, Finance and Human Capital Management.

As companies partner with each other for mutual benefit, nowadays, where a large amount of manual work is automated, system integrations come into play and turn partnerships even stronger by providing higher speed, reliability and consistency to processes. This ultimately translates to automated data exchange between companies, and that's what Seaber has in its portfolio.

Benefits of the Seaber SAP integration

Integrations always come from agreements on how businesses will operate and how to translate between system interfaces (APIs or Application Programming Interfaces) and internal processes, such that the information that is exchanged actually reflects what the application, organization and people need to achieve as their goal.

As part of the agreements with companies that use SAP ERP, we at Seaber have a customized API that translates XML or JSON data into an internal layer of data that interprets what SAP produces. This implementation allows Seaber to receive the data in a specific standard format and process it to give it a proper shape. That’s when the second layer of processing comes into play to adjust raw data into the Seaber database, matching and evaluating additions and changes that clients request. With both layers, we are ready to charge and provide feedback to any incoming request from SAP.

What is an API?

APIs or Application Programming Interfaces are the front door of integrations and applications architecture. When an API is exposed to the external world (internet) it allows client applications to use it for their specific purposes with proper authentication and authorization for security reasons. APIs are also used internally in every modern application that is implemented with domain boundary layers where software components exchange data among themselves and are loosely coupled. In summary, an API delivers a client request to a system and sends the system's response back to a client, allowing applications to access data and interact with external or internal software components, operating systems, or microservices.

Why is SAP integration important to our customers?

As SAP ERP is the driving application to manage business for many corporations, by having SAP integration available in the portfolio, Seaber is able to provide fast and reliable responses to the business needs of our clients and prospects. With API usage, partners can benefit from using SAP standards and automate their processes instead of manual document exchange. Seaber also allows API customization to fit specific needs. Software is always evolving, after all.

What’s in it for me?

Well, there is a world of possibilities by using Seaber ERP integrations if you are a charterer or a shipowner in the bulk and break bulk shipping industry and want to evolve from manual, error-prone and tedious work to a next level automated application built on top of newest software architecture best practices. With the Seaber platform you can manage your entire shipping process. The Seaber maritime software enables charterers to plan, optimise and operate even the most complex fleet and cargo flow scenarios. For shipowners, our fleet planning solution brings cargo related requirements, costs, durations and vessel information into one place resulting in reduced ballast voyages and optimised schedules for cargo deliveries.

SAP can be customized to fit specific client needs and Seaber SAP integration process can also be adjusted and customized, if necessary. Thanks to the Seaber integration framework, we are now able to integrate to nearly any ERP. Contact us to discuss more or to book your live demo.