Direct integration with Adobe Commerce

The direct integration provides a solution with robust front-end e-commerce capabilities of Adobe Commerce and scalable back-end selling and order management capabilities of IBM® Sterling Order Management System. While both systems have inventory, order, catalog, pricing, and promotion components, this integration uses an optimal combination of these components, which minimizes the need for excessive synchronization between components. The integration manages the order lifecycle across channels from capture to fulfillment.

The direct integration uses the components of the Service Definition Framework (SDF) to connect and integrate Sterling Order Management System with Adobe Commerce. This integration handles order creation and order fulfillment for orders that are placed from an online store by using Adobe Commerce.

The SDF is used to receive messages from Adobe Commerce in to Sterling Order Management System and to send messages from Sterling Order Management System to Adobe Commerce.

When Adobe Commerce sends messages to Sterling Order Management System, the services automatically transforms the messages from JSON to XML. When Adobe Commerce receives messages from Sterling Order Management System, the services automatically transforms the messages from XML to JSON.

Components such as API nodes and XSL transformations are used for communication between Sterling Order Management System and Adobe Commerce. By default, the extensible SDF services are provided to perform the following actions:

Call the Adobe Commerce REST APIs.
Configure mapping of fields and values between the two systems.

The extensible SDF services also calls the default Sterling Order Management System APIs to perform various functions such as creating and canceling orders.

Integration architecture

With direct integration, the communication between Sterling Order Management System and Adobe Commerce is established by using the SDF services that are enabled as REST endpoints and is a synchronous integration. However, while internally processing inbound requests from Adobe Commerce, Sterling Order Management System reads messages from IBM MQ queue and uses the integration server to process the requests. For outbound requests to Adobe Commerce, Sterling Order Management System calls the Adobe Commerce REST APIs.

For order fulfillment, default services are provided for integration with Adobe Commerce. The default services use the XSLT and the IACValueMaps.xml files for integration between Sterling Order Management System and Adobe Commerce.

The XSLT files provide the default field mappings between Sterling Order Management System and Adobe Commerce. For example, SellerOrganizationCode in Sterling Order Management System maps to StoreID in Adobe Commerce.
The IACValueMaps.xml file provides the default value mappings between Sterling Order Management System and Adobe Commerce. For example, different order statuses in Sterling Order Management System maps to a single order status in Adobe Commerce. These status values are mapped in the IACValueMaps.xml file.

For more information, see Order fulfillment.

If you want to integrate any additional data from Adobe Commerce in Sterling Order Management System, you can customize the default services or create your own services within the SDF framework. For more information, see Customization.