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Recurrency and P21: Configuring SISM for Exporting POs

Updated over 2 months ago

Background

By adopting Recurrency, your organization can significantly reduce manual work associated with optimizing purchasing decisions, enhance data visibility, and uncover valuable trends that are often difficult to identify. Organizations that use Recurrency are frequently able to decrease their operating costs through more informed purchasing decisions, and increase their revenue by helping their sellers identify timely opportunities to sell additional products.

Recurrency’s feature set includes both read and write actions against your ERP system. This guide will go through how to authorize Recurrency to execute exports back to P21 via the Transaction API.

Using the Transaction API: If you are on the Epicor hosted cloud version of P21, you cannot run SISM. Instead, we can export POs via the Transaction API. You can find those details at the following link.

System Architecture

Before diving into the tactical steps, it’s important to have an understanding of the different components that make up Recurrency.

  • Epicor Prophet 21 MSSQL Database: behind every Prophet 21 deployment, there is a Microsoft SQL database that holds all of the data. Recurrency works by establishing a direct connection with this database.

  • Recurrency web application: hosted at https://app.recurrency.com, this is the website that users will interact with to use Recurrency’s features and capabilities

  • Recurrency production environment: this is our cloud based environment which hosts all of your data and the systems necessary to push/pull data to/from the Prophet 21 database. It also includes all of the systems which support the web application.

  • Prophet 21 SISM: the “scheduled import service manager” is a feature in P21 that is designed to process imports of objects from other systems. Recurrency uses SISM to create Purchase Orders in P21.

You need to be a P21 admin who can access P21 settings to modify SISM configurations.

This guide will provide screenshots from the Epicor Web UI. If you are using the Desktop UI, things may look different, but the same configuration values apply.

Enabling write access for dedicated database user: SISM only works if you've granted write access to the dedicated Recurrency database user. If you haven't done that yet, or are unsure, first visit this page for more details.

Enabling SISM for Purchase Orders

  1. Login to P21

  2. Open the P21 settings side panel

  3. Navigate to Scheduled Import Setup (Setup ->Imports/Exports -> Maintenance)

  4. You’ll then be brought to a configuration window, that looks something like the following:
    ​

  5. Then input the following configurations:

    1. Type of Input: User Import

    2. Transaction Set ID: Purchase Order

    3. Source File Polling Path: {some_system_path}\POLLING

    4. Transaction Summary File Path: {some_system_path}\SUMMARY

    5. Transaction Suspense File Path: {some_system_path}\SUSPENSE

    6. Transaction Error File Path: {some_system_path}\ERROR

    7. Transaction Log File Path: {some_system_path}\LOG

    8. Active: checked

        1. Setting File Path Config Values: Recurrency does not write to the filesystem to work with SISM. We do not reference the configuration values you have set; however, P21 will throw an error if they are NOT set to valid system paths that P21 can access. Please ensure the values you enter are valid system paths.
          ​
          If you are unsure what value to set this to, change the Transaction Set ID to another object you have SISM configured for, such as Sales Orders, and copy the value you see from there.

  6. Further down the screen, you’ll see the Setup Details List View table where you’ll enter the following config values:

    1. Purchase Order Header: RPOH

    2. Purchase Order Line: RPOL

    3. Purchase Order Line Notes: RPON

    4. Purchase Order Header Notes: RPOE

  7. At the end you should have something that looks like the following.
    ​

  8. Click Save

Enable Import Suspense Settings

SISM sometimes throws errors when attempting to import Purchase Order data. SISM will not provide detailed error messages unless the Import Suspense Settings are enabled. To make sure that Recurrency can surface useful error messages, and enable our team to best support you, we recommend enabling the Import Suspense Settings in your P21 environment.

image (10).png

To do this:

  1. Go to Import Suspense Settings (System->Imports/Exports)

  2. Go to the Query tab

  3. On a blank line in the table enter:

    1. Type of Import: User Import

    2. Transaction Set Id: Purchase Order

  4. Right click on the row and then select Apply Query

  5. This will take you to the Import Suspense Settings Form, where you should now change Status to Active

  6. Click Save in the top left

At the end your screen should look like this:
​

image (11).png

Confirming SISM Import Frequency

When configuring SISM you can use an existing process/task to control the imports or create a new one. Once you've decided, you can then control how frequently that task runs.

We recommend creating a dedicated scheduler for Recurrency POs. If you have other integrations that use SISM, they can sometimes flood SISM with many requests and that buries your POs in a very long queue. Having a standalone SISM scheduler for Recurrency POs ensures that those POs are processed quickly.

In either case, you should update your SISM frequency to be 30-60 seconds. Any longer than that, and it is possible for SISM to miss exports from Recurrency and not process them.

[Recommended] Create Dedicated Scheduler for Recurrency POs

Legacy P21 instances: If you are on a legacy version of P21, you may not have access to the task scheduler. You can skip this step but you should coordinate with your Recurrency point of contact to make sure things are working properly.

Prophet21 has this concept called "Schedulers" that manage how frequently specific tasks are run. SISM has a default scheduler it uses, but we've found it isn't always optimized for the types of imports Recurrency is trying to execute. We recommend creating a dedicated scheduler that will:

  1. Always be running

  2. Runs between 30-60 second intervals

To accomplish this:

  1. Login to P21

  2. Open the P21 settings side panel

  3. Navigate to Scheduled Import Setup (Setup ->Imports/Exports -> Maintenance)

  4. Select the SISM configuration you just created:

    1. Type of Import: User Import

    2. Transaction Set ID: Purchase Order

    3. The page will populate the details you entered in the previous steps

  5. In the top bar, you should see an option for "Schedule." Click on this

    1. If you see a popup asking if you would like to Edit an existing schedule, select No to enter the creation screen

  6. This will take you to the Schedule Task creation window. You'll enter the following details:

    1. Task Name: Recurrency SISM Import

    2. Description: Scheduler for Recurrency PO imports

    3. Start Date: Today's date

    4. Stop Date: leave the default (12/31/2049)

    5. Start and Stop Times: leave the defaults

    6. Interval: 30 seconds

    7. Recurrency Type: Daily

    8. Make Task Active: check
      ​

  8. Click OK

This will create a dedicated scheduler that looks only for Recurrency created POs and manages it on the set schedule.

Modifying SISM Import Frequency

In order for Recurrency to use SISM successfully, SISM needs to be running frequently enough to capture new POs and inform Recurrency that they were successfully imported.

Confirming the SISM import frequency is especially important if you chose not to create a dedicated scheduler. Even if you create the dedicated scheduler, you can confirm SISM frequency by doing the following:

  1. Navigate to Scheduled Import Setup (Setup ->Imports/Exports -> Maintenance)

  2. Enter the details for the SISM schedule you want to confirm. In our case, it's:

    1. Type of Import: User Import

    2. Transaction Set ID: Purchase Order

  3. Click on Schedule in the top nav bar

  4. If you see a popup that asks if you want to see existing schedules, click Yes

  5. This will then show you all schedulers that are configured to process this type of import

  6. Find the row where the Active column is checked. This is the scheduler that is actively running and looking for things to import. Click on that row.

  7. Click Ok

  8. This will bring you to the page to edit the scheduler details. It will also show you the current Interval Time.

  9. This value should be between 30 and 60 seconds. If you see this time is in minutes or hours, you should adjust that interval to be more frequent.

Testing SISM & Recurrency Exports

You can now test creating Purchase Orders in Recurrency and having Recurrency write those details back into P21 via SISM.

To do this:

  1. Login to Recurrency

  2. Navigate to Purchasing on the left hand side navigation

  3. This will place you into the Purchase Targets page, and you should click on the a PO Builder button in the top right

  4. Go through the process and create a PO

    1. If this is a test PO, make sure to leave the Approved box unchecked (i.e. submit an unapproved PO)

  5. Click Submit to P21

  6. You’ll see a notification saying your export has started, and should see a success message once completed

Once the PO is created, you should go into P21 and delete it.

If you have any questions, please reach out to your dedicated Account Executive, [email protected], or [email protected].

Related Articles
Recurrency and P21: Update Recurrency Database User Permissions for Write Access
Recurrency and P21: Configuring Transaction API for Exports
Recurrency and P21: On-Prem Integration Overview
Recurrency and P21: Cloud Integration Overview
Linking Backorders to POs in Purchasing
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