Automatic creation of locations for business partners

 

Dear friends of SAP TM,

As mentioned in several blog posts before, it’s crucial for SAP TM to work with entities of master data object ‘Location’. This holds true for transport planning in regards to source/destination locations, and may be also intermediate locations are involved. If the source or destination of a transport is now a business partner like a customer or vendor, this implies that a respective location needs to be in place.

There are various ways in SAP S/4HANA to create locations for business partners, but in the following example we will see the most smoothest one.

Let’s assume the following customer has been created in transaction BP:

When saving the customer on creation, the following location of type 1021 (business partner) has been created automatically:

How come? This is because the following BAdI has been implemented:

You see also the respective documentation, giving you hints how an implementation should look like.

That means furthermore:

• Without any implementation of this BAdI, no location is created from transaction BP
• If the BAdI is implemented correctly, also relevant address updates on the business partner are propagated to its location

Important to mention is, that this refers only to the manual creation of a business partner in transaction BP. When for example a business partner is replicated with DRF, this BAdI has no effect and thus no location is created. In the DRF replication, the location either has to be replicated as well after the business partner. Or, the location can be created in the target system with report /SAPAPO/CREATE_LOCATION.

Some additional remarks:

• Locations for business partners are always created with location type 1021 in SAP S/4HANA. The location types for customers (1010) and vendors (1011) aren’t used anymore in SAP TM.
• Locations are only created for a uniquely defined standard address of a business partner.

I hope this helps you a bit in your projects! Please feel free to comment!

Best regards,

Michael

Source: https://blogs.sap.com/2021/12/16/automatic-creation-of-locations-for-business-partners/