Business Partners in SAP S/4HANA

The Comprehensive Guide to Customer-Vendor Integration

Jawad Akhtar

• Publisher: SAP PRESS
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781493222230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

1 Introduction

Among a plethora of innovations and simplifications introduced in SAP S/4HANA, business partners and customer-vendor integration (CVI) form one of the key building blocks. While they were also available in SAP ERP, their complete realignment in SAP S/4HANA means a far more simplified data model and significantly reduced data redundancy, as well as a leading role in master data management.

In SAP S/4HANA, the business partner is the leading object and single entry point to maintain business partner, customer, and SAP S/4HANA supplier (known as vendors in SAP ERP) master data. The new approach is to ensure an easier maintenance of the master data and to achieve harmonization among them. Compared to multiple SAP ERP transactions, maintenance of customer and supplier master data through the business partner has multiple advantages. Some of those advantages are as follows:

• The business partner object allows maintenance of multiple addresses with corresponding address usages.
• In SAP ERP, one customer can only be associated to one account group. But with business partners, multiple roles can be associated to the same business partner.
• Maximum data sharing and reuse of data leads to easier data consolidation.
• General data is available for all the different business partner roles; specific data is stored for each role, such as a customer or a supplier.
• Multiple relationships can be maintained for the same business partner.
• Time dependency can be maintained at different subentities, roles, addresses, relationships, bank data, and so on.

In the following sections, we’ll discuss the concept of a business partner and its structure, including the business partner category, business partner grouping, and business partner role. In addition, we’ll also briefly introduce business partner and CVI, and how these two are interconnected.

1.1 Concept of a Business Partner

The business partner object’s capability to centrally manage master data for business partners, customers, and suppliers makes it a single point of entry to create, edit, and display master data for business partners, customers, and suppliers. This approach to master data maintenance eliminates redundant object models in the traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, such as SAP ERP, wherein the vendor master and customer master were used. Now, the mandatory target approach in SAP S/4HANA is the business partner approach.

Only SAP Business Suite customers with CVI in place can move to on-premise SAP S/4HANA via the conversion approach (the brownfield approach). It’s recommended, but not mandatory, that business partner number ranges and customer/vendor number ranges are the same in SAP S/4HANA. The single transaction to maintain a business partner in SAP S/4HANA is Transaction BP (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Master Data Management

A business partner can be a person, a group of persons, or an organization with some interest in the company’s business. During the course of a business relationship with a company, a business partner can assume other business partner roles. There’s no need to create the general data for each business partner role as it’s the same for all business partner roles. As a result, the same business partner can be used for different business functions. For example, a company can interact with business partner number 10000 as a customer in a customer role and as a vendor in a vendor role. In this way, a business partner can play multiple roles.

Note

The use o...