Hello All,
I am again touching base on BP (Business Partner) topic after a few business discussions in recent times.
Please refer to my old blogs on the same topic.
Business Partner SAP S/4 HANA insights | SAP Blogs
Business Partner creation with multiple contact persons/relationships on S4 HANA | SAP Blogs
This time, coming up with much more details and differences and what is the proper way of the business model of Business partner.
I would like to share a glimpse of my current experience with SAP S/4 HANA migration.
I see many of the consultants are treating BP creation is different and customer / Vendor creation is dependent on BP creation, which is a completely wrong assumption.
And this is a basic concept that brought changes from traditional ECC to S/4Hana architecture.
Please refer for the basic changes that took in place in S/4Hana – Business Partner SAP S/4 HANA insights | SAP Blogs
There are redundant object models in the traditional ERP system. Here the Vendor master and Customer master are used which are having several limitations. Limitations of the Customer/Vendor Object Model:
- Only one single address
- No relation between a Vendor and a Customer for the same real-world entity (no role concept)
- No persons (B2C)
- No time-dependency
The strategic object model in SAP S/4HANA is the Business Partner (BP). Business Partner is 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.
In terms of SAP Business Partner the definition for Customer and Vendor is the following:
Customer:
A Customer is a Business Partner to which goods and services are sold and/or delivered. A Business Partner can be a Customer and a Vendor at the same time if, for example, your Customer also supplies goods to you.
A Customer master holds information about the Customer such as their name, address, bank details, tax details, and delivery and billing preferences. This Customer information is used and stored in transactions such as sales orders, deliveries, and invoices.
Some Customer information is specific to a company (known as company code) or sales unit (known as sales area) within your organization.
Vendor:
A Vendor (or Supplier) is a Business Partner which delivers and sells goods and services to your organization. A Business Partner can be a Vendor and a Customer at the same time if, for example, your Vendor also buys goods from you.
A Vendor master holds information about the Vendor such as their name, address, bank details, tax details, and billing preferences. This Vendor information is used and stored in transactions such as purchase orders, goods receipts, and Vendor invoices.
Some Vendor information is specific to a company (known as company code) or purchasing unit (known as purchasing organization) within your organization.
Advantages / New functionality of Business Partner over ECC (Customer / Vendor):
- A legal entity is represented with one Business Partner
- One Business Partner can perform multiple roles, e.g., Customer and Vendor (Supplier)
- General data is available for all different Business Partner roles, specific data is stored for each role
- Maximal data sharing and reuse of data leads to an easier data consolidation
- Different Business Partner Categories – Organization, Person, Group
- Flexible Business Partner Relationships possible like “has contact person”, “is married with” etc.
- One Business Partner can have multiple addresses
- Time-dependency on different sub-entities e.g. role, address, relationship, bank data, etc.
- Provide harmonized architecture across applications
To use the SAP Business Partner as a leading object in SAP S/HANA, the Customer/Vendor Integration (CVI) must be used. The CVI component ensures the synchronization between the Business Partner object and the Customer/Vendor objects.
To use the SAP Business Partner as a leading object in SAP S/HANA, the Customer/Vendor Integration (CVI) must be used. The CVI component ensures the synchronization between the Business Partner object and the Customer/Vendor objects.
The diagram below illustrates the context.
CVI Complex Interface
How A BP differs from ECC Customer and Vendor:
It is always a false assumption that BP gets created 1st and then followed by Customer and Vendor – false interpretation.
the fact is that a Business Partner is always created when a Customer or Vendor is created.
The complex interface of the CVI (Customer/Vendor Integration) contains Business Partner specific data as well as Customer and Vendor-specific data.
Partially, the data of the Business Partner and Customer/Vendor are redundant (BUT000 against KNA1 & LFA1 data).
For instance, ‘Name and Address specific attributes are available in both sets of tables.
Customer or Vendor-specific data is routed through the Customer/Vendor specific interface and mixed up with the Business Partner central data.
On commit, the Business Partner and corresponding Customer and/or Vendor are maintained/created.
SAP supports the conversion of existing Customer and Vendor data to Business Partner via guided
procedure reports.
ECC Transactions that become obsolete:
The following SAP Business Suite transactions are no longer available or redirect to transaction BP:
- FD01, FD02, FD03, FD05, FD06, FD08 (Create, Change, Display, Block, Deletion mark, Confirm Customer (Accounting))
- FK01, FK02, FK03, FK05, FK06, FK08 (Create, Change, Display, Block, Deletion mark, Confirm Vendor (Accounting))
- MAP1, MAP2, MAP3 (Create, Change, Display Contact Person)
- MK01, MK02, MK03, MK05, MK06, MK12, MK18, MK19 (Create, Change, Display, Block, Deletion mark Vendor (Purchasing))
- V-03, V-04, V-05, V-06, V-07, V-08, V-09, V-11, V+21, V+22, V+23 (Create invoice recipient, payer, consignee, one-time Customer, ordering party, carrier, sales prospect,
competitor, Business Partner (Sales/Centrally)) - VAP1, VAP2, VAP3 (Create, Change, Display Contact Person)
- VD01, VD02, VD03, VD05, VD06 (Create, Change, Display, Block, Deletion mark Customer (Sales))
- XD01, XD02, XD03, XD05, XD06, XD07 (Customer: Create, Change, Display, Block, Deletion mark, Change Account Group (Centrally))
- XK01, XK02, XK03, XK05, XK06, XK07 (Vendor: Create, Change, Display, Block, Deletion mark, Change Account Group (Centrally))
CVI ensures that Customer and Vendor master data tables are updated automatically after a BP is
created/changed. All KNxx and LFxx Customer/Vendor master data tables are still populated as previously in SAP Business Suite.
In SAP S/4HANA BP transaction covers almost all Customer/Vendor master data fields. For additional fields that are not included in the standard SAP S/4HANA BP transaction kindly go over the BDT interface activities in order to add your own custom fields
Now, Let’s talk about the limitations in BP:
Limitations:
there are some functional restrictions compared to S/4HANA to be considered when using BP as a leading object in SAP ERP, e.g.:
- It is not possible to maintain all the customer- or supplier fields or data needed. There are no plans to implement additional fields here since the xD0x- and xK0x-transactions continue to exist.
- Field modification from FI (e.g. by account group) is not considered in BP-transaction.
- Multiple Assignment is not available in SAP ERP.
- No FIORI-apps to maintain BP, BP-Customer, and BP-Supplier.
- Neither account group information nor change feature is available in BP-transaction (but XD07/XK07 is available).
- There is no search help / no locator search or display like “BP by Customer/Vendor”.
- Accessing Customer/Vendor documents from BP-transaction is not possible.
- From BP-transaction there is no direct menu link to Customer or Vendor classification data.
- Forward navigation in partner schema of customer/vendor data is not supported (double click on partner number is not supported).
- All the SAP Business Suite help documents refer to Customer and Vendor rather than Business Partner for these transactions
A summary of the process:
1. Archive obsolete vendors and customers. This is highly recommended as will reduce the number of customers, vendors to be synchronized. (In some projects it is not possible as the company does not have the archiving procedure set for customers and vendors). All nonarchived objects will need to be synchronized as the installation process will check that.
2. Analyze the ranges. It is recommended that Business Partner ID and Vendor/Customer ID are the same, but this is not always possible as in SAP ECC is normal that customers and vendors have to overlap in ranges. You must plan the new ranges numbers if overlapping exists.
2. Implement pre-checks, Activate Business Functions and Perform customizing.
3. Execute the Mass Data Synchronization program.
4. If data errors appear (and trust me, they will), be prepared to execute a data cleansing process.
5. Re-execute the synchronization cockpit until everything is synchronized.
important considerations:
*Business Partner roles:
The synchronization will create the BP with 2 roles for each object:
- For customers: FI Customer and Customer
- For vendors: FI Vendor and Vendor
One corresponds to the FI area and the other one to the sales/purchasing area.
*Execution parameters:
In my experience, the performance of the program is not great. For a small number of customers/vendors will not be a problem, but if you have hundreds of thousands of employees/vendors it can be an issue. However, by increasing the number of parameters “Max. Processes”, the performance will improve.
For example, if you change this parameter to 10, the program will parallelize the batch execution, improving the timing. Of course, this must be tested to find the optimal size as might depend on your system architecture settings.
*Ranges overlapping:
When there are ranges overlapping and you need to pick how to maintain vendors’ or customers’ numbers, SAP recommends maintaining customers as usually sales and customers are more important for companies than vendors (of course, companies prefer to send invoices and collect money than pay them).
I hope my learning and analysis would help you to understand the Business Partner / Customer Vendor Integration.
In the next blog posts, we can discuss more processing.
That’s all about this blog post.
Thanks for reading, please provide your feedback. ?
Happy Learning, see you in my next blog 
Thanks,
Venkatesh Golla
Source: https://blogs.sap.com/2021/12/12/s-4hana-busines-partner-customer-vendor-integration-cvi-concept-between-traditional-ecc-vs-s-4hana/
