How India's Second-Largest Commercial Vehicle Manufacturer Modernised Its SAP Integration Estate
India’s second-largest commercial vehicle manufacturer undertook a large-scale migration from SAP PI/PO to the SAP Integration Suite, modernising 230+ interfaces across manufacturing, supplier networks, dealer systems, financial platforms, and B2B partner channels.
When SAP confirmed that PI/PO support would sunset by 2027, that backbone became a liability with a deadline attached.
The Problem Was Not Just the Platform
SAP PI did its job for years. The decision to move was not a reflection of the platform's past value — it was a recognition that the gap between what PI was built for and what the business now required had become too wide to manage.
On-premise infrastructure meant high maintenance overhead, rising specialist costs, and limited observability. Every change to an interface required manual effort, lengthy deployment cycles, and coordination across teams. The estate had grown organically to include hundreds of interfaces spanning ERP, supply chain, dealer management, financial postings, and external partner connectivity.
The talent market had also moved on. SAP PI specialists were harder to source, more expensive to retain, and increasingly replaced by engineers trained on SAP Integration Suite and cloud-native integration patterns.
None of these problems were new. What changed was the vendor timeline. The sunset deadline made delay a risk decision, not just a planning one.
Why a Manual Approach Was Never Viable
The instinct for large migration programmes is to treat each interface as an individual task: analyse, rebuild, test, deploy. At fifty interfaces, that is a project. At 230+, it is a multi-year commitment that would consume the available window before the migration was complete.
That approach also accumulates risk. Manual conversions introduce variation. Each interface rebuilt by hand carries the judgment of the individual who built it, which may or may not match the behaviour of the original. Testing at scale without automation means either accepting gaps in coverage or spending disproportionate time on regression.
Tarento's position was that the programme would only be viable if automation was the primary delivery mechanism, not an accelerator applied to a fundamentally manual process.
SAP PI/PO to SAP Integration Suite Migration Approach
The programme was built on iVolve, Tarento's SAP-certified migration automation framework, designed specifically for PI/PO to SAP Integration Suite transitions.
Rather than treating the migration as a sequence of individual interface tasks, iVolve applied automation across the full migration lifecycle: discovery, conversion, validation, and deployment.
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. This step, which typically requires weeks of manual effort in conventional programmes, produced an accurate and prioritised migration backlog without proportionate analyst involvement. Teams that skip structured discovery find the complexity mid-programme, when it is expensive to absorb.
Conversion followed a factory model. For interfaces within standard patterns — IDoc, RFC, SOAP, REST, and file-based scenarios — iVolve automated the conversion from PI artefacts to their SAP Integration Suite equivalents. Smart mapping tooling identified where direct conversion was possible and surfaced where custom logic required human review. This separation meant senior integration architects spent their time on the exceptions, not the routine.
Validation was systematic, not manual. Once interfaces were converted, automated validation confirmed functional equivalence between the old and new environments. Governance tooling tracked migration status across the estate, flagged deviations, and provided programme-level visibility. This layer removed the dependency on end-to-end manual regression testing across every scenario — and caught the silent failures that manual review is least likely to detect.
Deployment was phased by risk, not by convenience. Critical 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. The sequencing protected the business at the points where failure would have been most damaging, while maintaining delivery momentum across the broader estate.
SAP Integration Suite Migration Outcomes
| 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 |
The organisation now runs its integration estate on SAP Integration Suite — the platform SAP is actively investing in, where new capabilities are being built, and where the integration patterns required for future transformation programmes are supported natively.
Before and After
| Dimension | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | SAP PI/PO on-premise | SAP Integration Suite on SAP BTP |
| Infrastructure overhead | Servers, licences, 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 cannot match the complexity of the estate.
Volume demands a factory model, not a project model. When each interface is treated as a discrete manual task, the programme creates a queue — not a delivery pipeline. Automation frameworks change that equation by industrialising the repeatable and reserving human judgment for what genuinely requires it.
Discovery is the foundation, not the preamble. Organisations consistently underestimate the scale and complexity of their integration estate. Automated discovery produces a migration backlog that is accurate, prioritised, and grounded in real traffic data — not assumptions made during scoping.
Prioritising by business criticality, not technical sequencing, protects continuity. Interfaces carrying financial postings and production orders carry a different failure cost than interfaces that are lower-volume and operationally isolated. The sequencing of migration should reflect that difference.
Automation changes the risk calculus, not just the speed. Manual migrations accumulate inconsistency. Automated migrations apply the same conversion logic across hundreds of interfaces and surface deviations systematically. The result is a more consistent estate, not just a faster one.
Why Enterprises Are Moving from SAP PI/PO to SAP Integration Suite
For enterprises still running SAP PI/PO, the business case for staying has narrowed considerably. The platform continues to operate, but it no longer represents the direction of SAP's integration strategy. SAP Integration Suite is where new capabilities are being released, where cloud-first and API-led integration patterns are supported, and where organisations gain a platform that is built for the next decade of enterprise transformation — not 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 requires. The migration decision is not primarily a technology question. It is 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 did not wait for the deadline to force the decision. It chose the moment, chose the approach, and built a modern integration backbone that the business can depend on and extend for years ahead.
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