Simplification Item: Business Partner Approach / Customer-Vendor Integration (CVI)

With the TOP Simplification List Items approach we want to start a S/4HANA SCN Blog series to provide more information about dedicated simplification items. Simplification items where we assume that any customer project has to deal with. The following S/4HANA SCN Blog is collecting these TOP Simplification Items with the links to the dedicated S/4HANA blogs.

The TOP Simplification List Items

Within this blog we want to provide additional information regarding the Simplification Item Business Partner Approach (Customer-Vendor Integration).

 

Simplification List Item Description

• There are redundant object models in the traditional ERP system. Here the vendor master and customer master is used. The (mandatory) target approach in SAP S/4HANA is the Business Partner approach (Customer-Vendor Integration [CVI]).
• 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.
• The specific tables for customer data (KNA1) and vendor data (LFA1) remain available and are not impacted.

Business Impact

• Only SAP Business Suite customer with C/V integration in place can move to SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition 1511 (Conversion approach).
• It´s recommended but not mandatory that BuPa ID and Customer-ID / Vendor ID are the same.
  Note: In case of overlapping number ranges for Customer and Vendor in Business Suite start system additional number range alignment is required!
• The user interface for SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition 1511 is transaction BP. The specific transaction codes to maintain  customer/vendor separately like known from SAP Business Suite, are not available within SAP S/4HANA.

Required and Recommended Action(s)

• Execute the related conversion pre-checks. Adaption required in dependency to the pre-check results
• Necessary CVI Business Partner transformation customizing settings and checks must be performed
• Remove and avoid inconsistent customizing and inconsistent customer data (for example: Missing customizing tax types or inconsistent customer data like e-mail addresses without @-sign)

More Details:

• For more details see the PPT attached to the following SAP Note 2265093: https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/0002265093
• See Customizing resolution program provided  to find out missing customizing entries and the solution to create/correct these entries for each client (SAP Note 2344034) https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/0002344034
• For the Conversion of Employees to Business Partners see appropriate Simplification Item (or the related text which is based on SAP Note 2340095