Business Partner Approach in SAP S/4 HANA

怼烎@ 2022-09-14 13:23 226阅读 0赞

**Business Partner Approach in SAP S/4 HANA**

The following blog post provides an insight into the SAP S/4 HANA system and how business partner setup must be done for migration.

I would like to share a glimpse of my current experience with SAP S/4 HANA migration.

Many of us always struggle where to start, how to start and finally ends with why to start ?

Let us discuss, how to start/maintain a system with clean data and migrate to SAP S/4 HANA.

For a successful implementation of the data migration, it is vital that the system is populated with a **complete and accurate **set of data from legacy systems that meets the technical requirements of target systems and the business requirements of its users.

In any project, appropriate understanding and analysis of the data of the source system and the ‘**to be**’ system allows a program of data management actions to be defined and implemented to produce a data set:

*  That maximizes the **value of legacy data **used in the new system
 *  That makes data available to accelerate **business benefit **delivery
 *  That meets the **data demands** of business processes
 *  That meets the **technical data demands.**
 *  Takes care of **pain areas **of the current data quality

With current project experience, I have divided into below categories

1.  Analysis – of the system (source and target) and source data
2.  Enrichment – the source data
3.  Cleansing – the data
4.  Consolidation – final output which is going to be migrated

SAP S/4 HANA offers you many new possibilities for managing your business partner data. But many SAP customers realize: a smooth transition is impossible with the data as it is – the quality is just too poor.

Companies found data migration is more difficult than expected, let us go through how (with my knowledge)

*  Today, customer and supplier data might be distributed everywhere. Tomorrow, you want it consolidated in one database (the “SAP Business Partner”)
    
     *  Eg: company ABCD may be having their businesses in different countries and maintaining their transactional data in various databases and they have decided to consolidate their customer data and supplier’s data at one point.
     *  And here is a solution what are we talking about.

Issues generally what we face:

*  Countless duplicates make it very hard to identify the truly active business partners
 *  Closer to go-live, companies discover that data is incorrect and incomplete, automatic transactions do not go through; deliveries might end up at the wrong address
 *  As the go-live date looms, the time has run out to organize a manual data cleanup

In SAP S/4 HANA, Business Partner is the leading object and single-entry point to maintain Business Partner, Customer, and Supplier (formerly known as Vendor) master data. This is to ensure ease of maintenance of the above master data and to achieve harmonization between them. Compared to classical ERP transactions, maintenance of Customer and Supplier master data via Business Partner has multiple advantages. Some of them are as follows:

*  Business Partner allows maintenance of multiple addresses with corresponding address usages.
 *  In classical transactions, one customer can only be associated with one account group. But in Business Partner, multiple roles can be associated with the same Business Partner.
 *  Maximal data sharing and reuse of data which lead to easier data consolidation.
 *  General Data available for all different Business Partner roles, specific data is stored for each role.
 *  Maintenance of multiple relationships to the same Business Partner.
 *  Maintenance of Time Dependency at different sub-entities roles, address, relationship, bank data, etc.

**Description:**

There are redundant object models in the traditional ERP system. Here the vendor master and customer master are used. The (mandatory) target approach in SAP S/4 HANA is the Business Partner approach.

Business Partner is now capable of centrally managing master data for business partners, customers, and vendors. With current development, BP is the single point of entry to create, edit, and display master data for business partners, customers, and vendors.

Using RFC functions, we can target to load/migrate the data to SAP S/4 HANA.

There are standard RDP (Rapid Data Mart) functionalities were offered by SAP, it is the best to part of creating business partners.

Like using CVI functions, we can create, edit and delete\*(this is a huge topic could be discussed, here deleting could be considered as limited to the individual roles).

In native application, it is not possible to migrate customer and vendor/supplier together to the target system, the question arises here is: can we achieve this through a business partner approach in SAP S/4 HANA?

The answer is: YES, we can.

The solution is: Maintaining with different roles in a business partner for supplier and customer.

Ideally, for a customer- it will be FLCUXX(FLCU00/FLCU01)

As below:

FLCU00 will be accounting and FLCU01 will be sales

![watermark_type_ZHJvaWRzYW5zZmFsbGJhY2s_shadow_50_text_Q1NETiBA5Zac5qyi5omT6YWx5rK555qE6ICB6bif_size_14_color_FFFFFF_t_70_g_se_x_16][]

In details:

How to navigate to Business partner?

Answer is:

Go to SAP screen and Tcode – BP

![watermark_type_ZHJvaWRzYW5zZmFsbGJhY2s_shadow_50_text_Q1NETiBA5Zac5qyi5omT6YWx5rK555qE6ICB6bif_size_14_color_FFFFFF_t_70_g_se_x_16 1][]

Then you can find the next screen with business partners:

![watermark_type_ZHJvaWRzYW5zZmFsbGJhY2s_shadow_50_text_Q1NETiBA5Zac5qyi5omT6YWx5rK555qE6ICB6bif_size_13_color_FFFFFF_t_70_g_se_x_16][]

You can easily identify with roles, what are you dealing with:

The base role should be a business partner- 000000- In general, you need to do nothing here, it will automatically be created with other roles by default.

Let us see other roles here for customer and vendor integration:

1.  Business Partner -000000
2.  Customer- FLCUXX
    
    1.  Customer Account
    2.  Customer sales
3.  Vendor -FLVNXX
    
    1.  Vendor accounting
    2.  Vendor purchasing

You can easily identify in below screen:

![watermark_type_ZHJvaWRzYW5zZmFsbGJhY2s_shadow_50_text_Q1NETiBA5Zac5qyi5omT6YWx5rK555qE6ICB6bif_size_13_color_FFFFFF_t_70_g_se_x_16 1][]

The subcategory roles will be replaced XX with 00/01/02 follows (customization part).

In a nutshell, we can send these roles along with additional details which were required like general data along with address, identification details, sales organizations, company details, vendor general data, vendor purchasing information and maintaining relationships(another tricky part and important for BPs)

The above-mentioned additional details will itself another big topic like, how to set up sales orgs, purchase information, company details, etc, could be probably discussed in the next blogs.

Learning credits: @arunkumar Yadav

You can find more details here in the following link, how to configure too.

[SAP Help Portal][]

In the next blog posts, we can discuss more on the processings.

That’s all about this blog post.

Happy Learning!!!

[Business Partner SAP S/4 HANA insights | SAP Blogs][Business Partner SAP S_4 HANA insights _ SAP Blogs]

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[SAP Help Portal]: https://help.sap.com/viewer/a9e6035c747e4b30ade42462f2c5d9ab/6.05.16/en-US/d5f9c5536a51204be10000000a174cb4.html
[Business Partner SAP S_4 HANA insights _ SAP Blogs]: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/09/12/business-partner-sap-s4-hana-insights/comment-page-1/#comment-472985