How India's Second-Largest Commercial Vehicle Manufacturer Modernised Its SAP Integration Estate

Migrating from SAP PI/PO to SAP Integration Suite at scale works when automation, not manual rebuilding, is the primary delivery method. India's second-largest commercial vehicle manufacturer moved 230+ interfaces spanning manufacturing, supplier networks, dealer systems, and B2B partner channels using iVolve, Tarento's SAP-certified migration framework, achieving 60 to 80 percent automation across discovery, conversion, and validation with no major production incidents. The trigger: SAP confirmed PI/PO support ends in 2027, turning a long-deferred modernization decision into one with a fixed deadline attached.

The Problem Was Never Just the Platform

SAP PI did its job for years. Moving off it isn't a verdict on its past value, it's a recognition that the gap between what PI was built for and what the business now needs had grown too wide to manage. On-premise infrastructure meant high maintenance overhead, rising specialist costs, and limited observability. Every interface change required manual effort, lengthy deployment cycles, and cross-team coordination. The estate had grown organically to span ERP, supply chain, dealer management, financial postings, and external partner connectivity.

The talent market moved on too. SAP PI specialists have become harder to source and more expensive to retain, while engineers increasingly train on SAP Integration Suite and cloud-native integration patterns instead. None of this was new. What changed was the vendor timeline: the 2027 sunset made delay a risk decision, not just a planning one.

Why a Manual, Interface-by-Interface Migration Was Never Viable

The instinct on large migration programmes is to treat each interface as its own task: analyze, rebuild, test, deploy. At fifty interfaces, that's a project. At 230-plus, it's a multi-year commitment that consumes the available window before the migration even finishes.

Manual conversion also compounds risk in a specific way: each interface rebuilt by hand carries the judgment of whoever built it, which may not match the original's actual behavior. Testing at that scale without automation means either accepting coverage gaps or spending disproportionate time on regression. Tarento's position going in was direct: the programme would only work if automation was the primary delivery mechanism, not an accelerator bolted onto an otherwise manual process.

The SAP PI/PO to SAP Integration Suite Migration Approach

The programme ran on iVolve, Tarento's SAP-certified migration automation framework built specifically for PI/PO to SAP Integration Suite transitions, applying automation across the full lifecycle rather than treating each interface as a discrete task.

• Discovery came first. Before any migration work began, iVolve scanned the existing PI environment and produced a complete inventory of active interfaces, including traffic patterns, business criticality, mapping structures, and inter-system dependencies. Work that typically consumes weeks of manual analyst effort produced an accurate, prioritized migration backlog without proportionate headcount. Teams that skip structured discovery find the real complexity mid-programme, when it's expensive to absorb.

• Conversion ran on a factory model. For interfaces within standard patterns, IDoc, RFC, SOAP, REST, and file-based scenarios, iVolve automated conversion from PI artifacts to their SAP Integration Suite equivalents. Smart mapping identified where direct conversion was possible and surfaced where custom logic needed human review, keeping senior architects focused on exceptions rather than routine work.

• Validation was systematic, not manual. Automated validation confirmed functional equivalence between old and new environments once interfaces converted. Governance tooling tracked migration status across the estate and flagged deviations, removing dependence on end-to-end manual regression testing and catching the silent failures manual review is least likely to spot.

• Deployment was phased by risk, not convenience. Interfaces carrying financial transactions, production orders, and partner communications ran in parallel across both environments until live equivalence was confirmed. Lower-risk, higher-volume interfaces moved in structured batches, protecting the business where failure would have been most damaging while keeping delivery moving across the broader estate.

Migration Outcomes at a Glance

Metric	Outcome
Interfaces migrated	230+ PI interfaces moved to SAP Integration Suite
Automation rate	60-80% of migration tasks automated end-to-end
Business continuity	No major production incidents during migration
Infrastructure model	On-premise eliminated; fully cloud-based on SAP BTP
Manual effort	Significantly reduced versus a conventional delivery approach
Timeline	Compressed relative to industry norms for an estate of this size

Before and After: SAP PI/PO vs. SAP Integration Suite

Dimension	Before	After
Platform	SAP PI/PO on-premise	SAP Integration Suite on SAP BTP
Infrastructure overhead	Servers, licenses, and maintenance costs	Consumption-based cloud model
Observability	Limited monitoring and alerting	Native monitoring, tracing, and alerting
Delivery speed	Lengthy deployment and change cycles	Faster iteration and release
Vendor trajectory	Approaching end-of-support in 2027	Active SAP investment and roadmap
Specialist dependency	Niche PI/PO skills, constrained supply	Broader Integration Suite talent pool

What This Programme Demonstrated

Large-scale middleware migration fails most often not because the technology is wrong, but because the delivery model can't match the estate's complexity. Volume demands a factory model, not a project model: treating each interface as a discrete manual task creates a queue, not a delivery pipeline, and automation frameworks industrialize the repeatable work while reserving human judgment for what genuinely needs it.

Discovery is the foundation, not the preamble. Organizations consistently underestimate the scale of their own integration estate, and automated discovery produces a backlog grounded in real traffic data rather than scoping assumptions. Prioritizing by business criticality rather than technical sequencing protects continuity, since interfaces carrying financial postings and production orders carry a different failure cost than low-volume, operationally isolated ones. And automation changes the risk calculus, not just the speed: manual migrations accumulate inconsistency, while automated ones apply the same conversion logic across hundreds of interfaces and surface deviations systematically, producing a more consistent estate, not just a faster one.

Why Enterprises Are Moving From SAP PI/PO to SAP Integration Suite Now

For enterprises still running SAP PI/PO, the case for staying has narrowed considerably. The platform still runs, but it no longer reflects SAP's integration direction. SAP Integration Suite is where new capabilities ship, where cloud-first and API-led integration patterns are supported, and where organizations get a platform built for the next decade of enterprise transformation rather than the last one.

The cost of legacy middleware is rarely paid all at once. It accumulates across infrastructure, specialist retention, delivery drag, and the inability to move as fast as the business needs. The migration decision isn't primarily a technology question. It's a question of when the carrying cost of staying exceeds the cost of moving, and for most PI/PO estates in 2026, that crossover has already happened.

India's second-largest commercial vehicle manufacturer didn't wait for the deadline to force the decision. It chose the moment, chose the approach, and built a modern integration backbone the business can depend on and extend for years ahead.

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Frequently Asked Questions

When does SAP end support for SAP PI/PO?

SAP has confirmed mainstream maintenance for Process Integration and Process Orchestration ends in 2027. Organizations still running critical flows on PI/PO need a migration plan in place well before that date, since a rushed, deadline-driven migration carries materially more risk than a planned one.

How long does a SAP PI/PO to SAP Integration Suite migration take for 200+ interfaces?

Timeline depends heavily on whether the migration is automation-led or manual. This 230-plus interface migration ran on a compressed timeline relative to industry norms for an estate of that size, driven by 60 to 80 percent automation across discovery, conversion, and validation rather than a fully manual rebuild.

What percentage of a SAP PI/PO migration can actually be automated?

In this programme, iVolve automated 60 to 80 percent of migration tasks end-to-end, covering interfaces within standard patterns like IDoc, RFC, SOAP, REST, and file-based scenarios. The remaining share required human review, specifically the interfaces carrying custom logic that automated mapping correctly flagged rather than tried to convert blindly.

What's the biggest risk in a large-scale SAP integration migration?

Treating each interface as an individual manual task rather than a pipeline. At estate sizes above roughly fifty interfaces, a fully manual approach becomes a multi-year commitment that risks running past the platform's own end-of-support deadline, while also accumulating inconsistency since each interface carries the judgment of whoever rebuilt it by hand.

Should interfaces be migrated in order of technical simplicity or business criticality?

Business criticality. Interfaces carrying financial transactions, production orders, and partner communications carry a materially higher failure cost than low-volume, operationally isolated ones, which is why this migration ran critical interfaces in parallel across both environments until live equivalence was confirmed, while moving lower-risk interfaces in structured batches.

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