SAP Business Partner
All stakeholders of a company in one property
If you want to switch to S/4HANA, there is no getting round the SAP business partner. Implementing the business partner and thus transforming your own customer, supplier and contact data is mandatory during an S/4HANA project.
But what exactly is the Business Partner and what are the advantages and disadvantages of implementing it?
In today's SAP ECC, a business partner, i.e. a company, person or group in which you as a company have an interest, can appear in several processes. Unfortunately, the same master data source is not used for all processes, although there is information that is identical in every process. This forces you to keep generalised data redundant. If you maintain both sales and purchasing relationships with an entity, a supplier and a customer must be created and maintained in the system. If generally valid data changes, both data records must be kept up to date accordingly. The maintenance of redundant data is no longer necessary thanks to the business partner. Where previously several transactions were necessary to keep the master data up to date and of high quality, there is now only one. Knowledge about business relationships becomes more transparent and shifts away from the specialised departments.
Advantages of the SAP Business Partner
The SAP Business Partner represents a centrally maintained entity with which your company maintains relationships. As a superordinate instance, it contains all generally valid information and forwards it to customers and suppliers that continue to exist. This means that the customer/supplier objects continue to exist in an SAP S/4HANA system, but are automatically kept up to date by maintenance in the Business Partner via the so-called customer-vendor integration, or CVI for short.
At least that's the theory according to SAP. In practice, however, this ‘simplified data storage’ actually causes problems. For example, only one email address can now be entered for customers and suppliers, i.e. in the Business Partner. This is then used when sending documents from both sales and purchasing. This causes problems because this information often varies. It should also be mentioned that the ‘Business Partner’ object is not integrated in almost all logistics modules. The customer/vendor objects continue to be used there.
Sounds confusing – and it is.
Our services
We help you to bring light into the darkness and support you with our expertise from a large number of projects.
- Initial Business Partner Workshop - Let's create the same understanding.
- Creation of a business partner concept
- Implementation of the Business Partner in ECC as a preliminary project for an S/4Hana brownfield project
- Carrying out the migration of the Business Partner to a new S/4Hana system (greenfield / crossfield)
- Implementation of the Business Partner employee
There is no way around the Business Partner - implementation is mandatory under S/4HANA.
Benefit from our extensive experience from numerous projects. Contact us now for an initial Business Partner Workshop.
We will also be happy to support you with the practical implementation afterwards.
