With S/4HANA, SAP is introducing a new user management concept into its ERP system: Business User Management. The following provides an overview of Business User Management and the role of the Business Partner employee.
A business user is defined as a natural person who is represented by a business partner and a link to a user in the system.
Under S/4HANA, every SAP user of an employee must be linked to a business partner. This means that name and address management takes place in the business partner and is mirrored in the user. This is intended to avoid duplicate maintenance of the same objects. This new ‘business partner employee’ is in turn required in a number of new functionalities within S/4HANA, for example to control the assignment of workflows, responsibilities or the sending of emails.
But how are all these links made by the system? Even during a Business Partner implementation in an SAP ECC system (in the case of an S/4HANA brownfield implementation), care must be taken to ensure that existing employee suppliers are correctly converted in the direction of Business Partners.
Within an S/4HANA implementation project, the extent to which Business User Management or the Business Partner employee is implemented must be defined. In the case of HCM integration or the maintenance of HR master data in the ERP system, complete integration is recommended in any case.
Reports delivered by SAP then take care of the entire lifecycle of the Business Partner employee. This includes the initial creation, updating in the event of changes through to inactivation when an employee leaves.
The Business Partner employee is not only responsible for linking user data. The new master data is intended to bundle all the functionalities of an employee. The HR master data and the employee as a supplier or customer also play a role in the employee business partner construct.
The aim is to view the HR master data as a ‘single point of truth’ in an existing HCM integration. By linking the HR master data with the employee business partner and thus with the system user, a change from HCM should be mirrored in all relevant employee objects in S/4HANA. The construct can be extended to include a supplier or customer for defined employees, for example.