One Integration, Five Sync Points: How YARDtwin Talks to SAP

Every SAP integration conversation eventually arrives at the same three questions. When exactly does each message fire? What is actually in it? And what does our SAP user see when it lands? Feature lists don't answer those questions — so we made a video that does nothing else.

It replays a real delivery — a bulk load, weighed in at 18,500 kg and out at 13,500 kg — and follows it across the SAP–YARDtwin boundary one exchange at a time. Five sync points, each shown three ways: the moment in the yard that triggers it, the message on the wire, and the SAP view where it lands.

Sync 1 — SAP opens the conversation

The inbound delivery is the only message SAP sends first. When it is created in S/4HANA, your middleware — SAP CPI in the video — picks it up and posts one JSON body to YARDtwin's HTTPS webhook, signed with a shared secret. Delivery number, plant, material, five thousand kilos planned: everything the yard needs, nothing typed.

On the YARDtwin side the booking builds itself. The delivery lands in the integration log and appears on the schedule with its material and planned quantity already in place. Nobody re-keys a delivery, so nobody mis-keys one.

Syncs 2 and 3 — the yard reports back, hands-free

From here the direction reverses: YARDtwin answers from the gate and the bay, and no one at a desk types a transaction.

• Sync 2 — transportation-unit registration. Fires the moment the gate operator authorises entry. Check-in time, dock, the weighbridge gross — and an SAP-native block your CPI maps one-to-one. SAP acknowledges with the TU reference; the EWM user sees a transportation unit arrived at the checkpoint, gross weight already on the record.
• Sync 3 — warehouse-task confirmation. Fires when the unload completes. Inside it are fields an EWM consultant recognises on sight: warehouse number, task, order, destination bin. In the warehouse monitor the task flips to confirmed — stock in the goods-receipt zone, exactly as the yard reported it.

Sync 4 — the goods receipt waits for the weighbridge

This is the message the integration exists for, and the one YARDtwin deliberately holds back. Unloading ends — and nothing posts. Only the signed departure weigh releases the goods receipt, carrying the net computed at the bridge: 5,000.000 kg as the entry-unit quantity, movement type 101, with the full weighbridge record riding along as evidence. SAP posts it and answers with the material-document number.

Sync 5 — closing the loop

As the truck exits, the yard-exit message carries the departure time, the turnaround, the verified net and the electronic-signature hash from the departure clearance. SAP sees the checkpoint departure and the delivery is complete. Five exchanges — one clean document flow, with the audit trail travelling with the truck.

What this is worth

• No re-keying, in either direction. SAP creates the booking; the yard posts the confirmations. The two systems stop being reconciled by a person with two screens.
• SAP stays the system of record — and gets better records. Weighed quantities, contemporaneous timestamps and signature evidence attach to the documents SAP already owns.
• Events SAP never had. Gate arrival, weighbridge readings, unload progress and departure exist nowhere in a standard SAP landscape. Now they arrive as structured messages instead of phone calls.
• Standard plumbing, not a project. Every message is JSON over HTTPS, HMAC-signed, delivered to your CPI or middleware — your integration team maps it onto the IDocs and BAPIs they already use. And every exchange is visible in YARDtwin's SAP message log, so any support conversation starts from the same evidence.

3-sync: the lighter way in

Not every site runs SAP EWM yard management — and if SAP does not manage your yard, three of those messages have nowhere useful to go. For that landscape YARDtwin runs the same integration in a 3-sync shape: YARDtwin owns the whole yard, and only two messages cross the boundary — the inbound delivery coming down, and the goods receipt going back.

The important part is that 3-sync is not a second product or a separate integration. It is the same five switches with three of them off. Start with delivery-in and goods-receipt-back — the lowest-risk first step — and if you later activate EWM yard processes, growing to the full five is a configuration change, not a re-implementation.

Configured to your business, switch by switch

Every sync point is an independent per-site switch, off by default. A site admin picks a one-click preset — yard-owned 3-sync or EWM-integrated 5-sync — or sets a custom mix per site. Multi-plant rollouts route each SAP plant to its own YARDtwin site, and re-sending a delivery is safe by design: an identical re-push changes nothing.

That is the same philosophy as the rest of the platform — gate checklists, weighbridge rules, Smart Slots modes and dock rules are all per-site configuration rather than code. For the broader tour of what you can shape without a developer, see Customise YARDtwin for your business; for the integration architecture in depth, see our SAP integration page.