The COBISOFT team also took part in the SAP Hackathon Hack2Build this year. The use case presented and the implementation on the SAP Business Technology platform convinced a top-class SAP jury.

To understand the scope of our Hack2Build solution, let’s first take a quick look at COBI.msv and MSV3 in general.

What is COBI.msv?

In the German pharmaceutical industry, orders for medicines between pharmacies and pharmaceutical wholesalers or suppliers are electronically mapped using SAP Business One and the pharmacy software. The MSV3 data interface is the general technical standard for the ordering process and offers direct communication between all market partners involved. MSV3 is a unified order protocol for the transmission of orders via web services (Internet). COBI.msv makes it possible to accept orders in MSV3 format and convert them into a SAP Business One sales order.

The challenge

For seamless integration into the regular SAP Business One workflow, COBI.msv uses a separately hosted server which accepts MSV3 requests and maps to the correct sales order in SAP Business One.

Up to this point, the provision and customer-specific configuration of a VM was extremely labor-intensive and claimed employees from various departments. At the same time, the large number of different hosting options posed a challenge for maintenance.

The solution

The answer to the challenge is the use of the SAP Business Technology platform (a cloud platform on which companies can use various services and functions) including the extension with Kubernetes and Kyma. This allows IT services to be deployed extremely efficiently, flexibly and quickly.

Using Kyma makes it possible to carry out all the necessary configurations in just one file, and to roll out a new customer-specific server instance with just one command – a huge relief for our employees. The solution is ready for use within a few minutes.

The use of the cloud platform SAP BTP brings further advantages for the pharmaceutical trade. In addition to the savings in investments – for example for uninterruptible power supply, fire protection, air conditioning, data security and access control, availability is a particularly decisive factor.