How a European Precision Manufacturer Migrated from SAP PI/PO to SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI)
Executive Summary
A leading European precision manufacturer operating across multiple plant locations was reaching a critical inflection point: its legacy SAP PI/PO middleware was no longer able to keep pace with a rapidly growing and increasingly complex integration landscape. With digital transformation accelerating across the business — and the PI/PO platform approaching end of mainstream maintenance — the organisation needed to move decisively to a scalable, cloud-native integration platform. Rialtes led the end-to-end migration from SAP PI/PO to SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI), delivering a zero-disruption cutover and unlocking a future-ready integration foundation across the organisation's European operations.
Integration Scenarios Migrated to CPI
Reduction in Integration Monitoring Effort
Faster Onboarding of New Integration Scenarios
Business Disruption During Cutover
Client Profile
The client is a mid-to-large precision manufacturing organisation headquartered in Central Europe, with production facilities and distribution operations spanning multiple European countries. Serving both industrial and consumer markets, the organisation produces highly engineered components and assemblies for sectors including automotive, industrial automation, and aerospace — operating to exacting quality and delivery standards across its plant network.
With SAP S/4HANA at the core of its enterprise operations, the organisation relies heavily on system integration to connect its ERP with a broad ecosystem of supplier portals, logistics platforms, manufacturing execution systems (MES), quality management tools, and financial systems across its European locations. Over the years, this integration landscape had grown organically on SAP PI/PO — a platform that, while robust in its time, was no longer equipped to support the pace and complexity of the organisation's evolving digital agenda.
The Challenge
What had begun as a manageable PI/PO landscape had, over a decade of organic growth, evolved into a sprawling integration mesh that was becoming increasingly difficult — and costly — to maintain, extend, and monitor. The organisation's integration team was spending more time keeping the lights on than enabling new business capabilities, and the risk of a major integration failure was growing with every new system added to the landscape.
Business Challenges
- Rapidly growing integration complexity is outpacing the capacity of the existing PI/PO landscape
- High cost and effort of maintaining on-premise middleware across multiple European plant locations
- Long lead times for adding new integration scenarios — slowing digital transformation initiatives
- Inability to support modern cloud applications and SaaS platforms being adopted across the business
Technical Challenges
- PI/PO infrastructure approaching end of mainstream maintenance, creating long-term support risk
- Limited monitoring and alerting capabilities, causing slow incident detection and resolution
- Growing number of point-to-point integrations creating a fragile, undocumented integration mesh
- Lack of reusable integration artefacts leading to duplication of effort across teams
The tipping point came when the organisation's digital leadership identified that PI/PO's limitations were directly slowing down three strategic programmes simultaneously: a pan-European ERP harmonisation, a supplier portal upgrade, and the rollout of a new MES across two production sites.
Our Solution
Rialtes designed and delivered a comprehensive PI/PO to SAP CPI migration programme — covering landscape assessment, architecture design, scenario migration, governance framework, and team enablement — ensuring the organisation emerged with a clean, scalable, and well-governed cloud integration platform.
Integration Landscape Assessment & Prioritisation
- Full audit of 200+ existing PI/PO integration scenarios across Finance, Procurement, Manufacturing, Logistics, and Quality
- Dependency mapping to identify sequencing risks and migration groupings
- Complexity and criticality scoring to prioritise migration waves and de-risk cutover
CPI Architecture Design
- Designed a scalable, multi-tenant CPI architecture aligned to the organisation's European operational structure
- Established integration design standards, reusable iFlow patterns, error handling frameworks, and naming conventions
- Defined a governance model for ongoing integration development, change management, and version control
Scenario Migration — Wave-Based Delivery
- Finance: AP/AR interfaces, bank communication, intercompany postings
- Procurement: Supplier EDI, purchase order confirmations, goods receipt notifications
- Manufacturing: MES-ERP integration, production order synchronisation, quality notifications
- Logistics: Freight carrier connectivity, shipping notifications, 3PL integrations
- Each wave followed a consistent migrate → test → sign-off → hypercare cycle before the next commenced
Monitoring, Alerting & Operational Readiness
- Configured CPI's native monitoring dashboards, message tracing, and automated alerting
- Replaced manual PI/PO monitoring routines with proactive, exception-based visibility
- Defined operational runbooks and escalation procedures for the client's internal team
Enablement & Knowledge Transfer
- Delivered structured CPI training for the client's integration architects and developers
- Produced comprehensive documentation covering architecture decisions, iFlow catalogue, and operating procedures
- Left the team fully equipped to own, extend, and govern CPI independently post-migration
Implementation
The migration was executed in six structured phases over approximately nine months, balancing speed of delivery with zero tolerance for business disruption across the organisation’s live European manufacturing operations:
Conducted a full audit of the existing PI/PO landscape — cataloguing all integration scenarios, message flows, interfaces, and dependencies across the European plant network. Prioritised scenarios for migration based on business criticality and complexity.
Designed the target CPI architecture including tenant strategy, naming conventions, error handling standards, and reusable integration patterns. Established a governance framework for ongoing integration development and change management.
Migrated a select set of high-priority, lower-risk integration scenarios to CPI as a pilot. Validated the architecture, tooling, and migration approach before committing to full-scale rollout.
Executed the migration of 200+ integration scenarios in structured waves, grouped by functional domain (Finance, Procurement, Manufacturing, Logistics). Each wave included testing, sign-off, and hypercare before the next wave commenced.
Coordinated a zero-downtime cutover across all European locations, with a dedicated hypercare period to monitor, stabilise, and fine-tune the new CPI environment post-go-live.
Delivered structured training and documentation to the client’s internal IT integration team, ensuring self-sufficiency for ongoing CPI operations, monitoring, and new integration onboarding.
Benefits & Outcomes
The migration to SAP CPI delivered immediate operational improvements and positioned the organisation's integration landscape to scale confidently alongside its broader digital transformation programme:
| Outcome Area | Quantifiable Impact | How It Was Achieved |
|---|---|---|
| Integration Scalability | 200+ scenarios migrated; unlimited cloud scale | CPI's elastic cloud architecture removed all constraints on the number and complexity of integrations |
| Monitoring & Visibility | ~65% reduction in monitoring effort | CPI's built-in alerting, dashboards, and message tracing replaced manual monitoring routines |
| Onboarding Speed | ~45% faster new integration delivery | Reusable iFlows, standardised patterns, and pre-built adapters dramatically reduced development time |
| Infrastructure Cost | Eliminated on-premises middleware costs | Decommissioning of PI/PO hardware and associated maintenance contracts across European locations |
| Cutover Risk | Zero business disruption at go-live | Phased wave approach and parallel-run validation ensured a seamless transition with no operational impact |
| Future Readiness | Cloud-native integration platform | CPI’s native connectivity to SAP BTP, S/4HANA, and third-party SaaS platforms positions the organisation for continued digital expansion |
Perhaps most significantly, the organisation’s IT integration team — previously consumed by PI/PO maintenance — now operates as a proactive enablement function, supporting the business’s digital agenda rather than managing around the limitations of a legacy platform.
“Our PI/PO landscape had become a bottleneck — every new integration was a project in itself. With SAP CPI, we can now connect systems in days, not months. The migration was smoother than we anticipated, and the difference in agility has been night and day.”
Why Rialtes For SAP CPI Migration
Rialtes brings deep, hands-on expertise in SAP integration across the full spectrum — from PI/PO architecture and optimisation through to CPI migration, greenfield implementation, and hybrid integration strategy. Our approach to PI/PO to CPI migrations combines a proven assessment methodology, reusable migration accelerators, and a commitment to leaving every client with a well-governed, self-sufficient integration platform.
- Proven PI/PO to CPI migration methodology with structured wave delivery
- Deep expertise across SAP S/4HANA, BTP, and third-party integration scenarios
- Manufacturing sector experience across automotive, industrial, and discrete manufacturing
- End-to-end ownership from assessment through to hypercare and enablement
