SAP S/4HANA and Fishbowl integration

What moves between them

The main flow moves from SAP S/4HANA into Fishbowl Advanced. Purchase orders, purchase requisitions, and supplier master records are read from SAP S/4HANA via OData and written into Fishbowl as vendors and purchase orders. Inventory and parts data flow the same direction so your inventory platform reflects the procurement and supply chain state in your ERP. The sync runs on a schedule tied to your procurement cycle; because SAP has no webhook push, ml-connector polls the OData APIs at regular intervals and updates Fishbowl when new or changed records appear.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores both credential sets encrypted and obtains an OAuth 2.0 bearer token from the SAP tenant-specific token endpoint, refreshing before expiry to prevent a 401 on an API call. On the Fishbowl side, ml-connector logs in once per session and caches the returned UUID token, re-authenticating when the session expires. Because SAP S/4HANA is pull-only and Fishbowl is on-premise, ml-connector polls both OData endpoints and Fishbowl REST endpoints on a schedule keyed to your procurement calendar. SAP purchase orders are mapped to Fishbowl purchase orders with vendors looked up by DUNS or supplier ID; on-premise deployments include the sap-client query parameter in the OData request. Fishbowl's lack of GL account exposure means payables accounting stays in your ERP and is not replicated into the inventory system. Every record carries a full audit trail and can be replayed if the session token expires or a downstream write fails.

A real-world example

A mid-sized discrete manufacturer runs SAP S/4HANA for ERP and finance on a cloud deployment, and Fishbowl Advanced on-premise for inventory management and procurement planning across three facilities. Before the integration, the procurement team created purchase orders in SAP S/4HANA and manually entered them into Fishbowl to trigger inventory receipts, leading to data inconsistencies and double-work during the month-end inventory reconciliation. With SAP S/4HANA and Fishbowl connected, purchase orders flow from the ERP into the inventory system automatically, inventory receipts can be matched to the source orders in Fishbowl, and the procurement and inventory teams work from a single source of truth. The month-end inventory audit is faster because the two systems are already aligned.

What you can do

• •Sync purchase orders and purchase requisitions from SAP S/4HANA to Fishbowl Advanced to keep procurement data current.
• •Map SAP suppliers and vendor master records to Fishbowl vendors and maintain bidirectional alignment on key fields.
• •Poll SAP S/4HANA on a schedule tied to your procurement cycle and write new and changed orders to Fishbowl without manual re-entry.
• •Authenticate SAP S/4HANA with OAuth 2.0 using the tenant-specific token endpoint and Fishbowl with session token authentication.
• •Track inventory movements and part master data across both systems so procurement orders and inventory receipts stay synchronized.

Questions

Which direction does data move between SAP S/4HANA and Fishbowl?

The main flow is from SAP S/4HANA into Fishbowl Advanced. Purchase orders, requisitions, and supplier master records move from the ERP into the inventory system. Supplier and vendor data can be synchronized bidirectionally where Fishbowl updates propagate back to SAP. GL account and cost center data remain read-only in SAP and do not flow into Fishbowl, since Fishbowl handles inventory and procurement only.

Does SAP S/4HANA support webhooks to push procurement data to Fishbowl?

No. SAP S/4HANA has no native webhook system for cloud connectors. ml-connector polls the OData APIs at regular intervals using timestamp filters and delta tokens to detect new and changed records, then writes them to Fishbowl. For real-time push, you would need to deploy SAP Event Mesh, which requires SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP); most customers use polling instead.

How does ml-connector handle the differences in authentication between SAP and Fishbowl?

ml-connector stores both credential sets encrypted and manages authentication independently. It obtains an OAuth 2.0 token from SAP's tenant-specific token endpoint before each call and refreshes before expiry, while obtaining and caching a Fishbowl session token that it re-authenticates when the session times out. The two token lifecycles are managed separately so an expiry on one side does not affect the other.