Business partners are new with S4HANA. They help avoid redundant data. This overview provides answers to three frequently asked questions after defining what business partners are. It discusses the goals of the concept and describes critical success factors before delving into integration and migration topics.

TOPICS COVERED

DEFINITION: BUSINESS PARTNERS

A A Business Partner, or Geschäftspartner in German, is an organization (company, branch), individual, or group of individuals or organizations with whom the company has a business interest.

Three frequently asked questions

HOW ARE BUSINESS PARTNERS USED?

Business Partners can be centrally recorded and managed for various business operations. This is particularly relevant when a Business Partner has different roles within a company, such as customer and goods recipient. A Business Partner can be created in different roles and can assume additional Business Partner roles over the course of a business relationship. General data for a Business Partner, not dependent on their function or application-specific extensions, does not need to be re-entered. This helps avoid the capture and storage of redundant data.

WHAT DOES THE BUSINESS PARTNER APPROACH MEAN FOR PROCUREMENT?

In S/4HANA, all business relationships are processed exclusively through the leading entity “Business Partner”. This entity bundles the common data of all manifestations such as name, address, bank details, and tax number. At the user interface, only Business Partners can be maintained, not suppliers. Transaction codes for suppliers are only usable to a limited extent. Roles and relationships, such as addresses and bank details, are time-dependent. However, the currently valid data must be manually transferred from the Business Partner to the supplier master. Through relationships and hierarchy assignments, Business Partners can be linked to each other in addition to the partner functions already known from earlier. This allows purchasing conditions to be optimized at the corporate level.

What business partner concepts exist?

Concept

Definition

USE

Business partner type

Characteristic of a business partner as a natural person (private individual), organization (legal entity or part of a legal entity, e.g. department), or group.

The following information can be captured, among others:

  • Organization: salutation, name, legal form, industry, legal entity
  • Person: salutation, first and last name, additional name components (such as name prefixes and academic titles), gender
  • Groups: salutation, two names, partner group type (marriage, flat share)

Business partner relationship

Business-relevant connection between two business partners

The following basic types of business partner relationships are available, among others:

  • Relationship type “belongs to flat share”
  • Relationship type “has the employee”
  • Relationship type “has the responsible employee”
  • Relationship type “is shareholder of”
  • Relationship type “is contact person of”
  • Relationship type “is identical with”
  • Relationship type “is married to”
  • Relationship type “is replaced by”

Business partner role

Rights and obligations that a business partner can assume in different business transactions.

Business classification of the business partner. A business partner can be assigned to one or more roles. The BP role “Business Partner – General” is automatically assigned to a business partner. In addition, depending on the function of the respective business partner, the following BP roles can be selected, among others:

  • BP role “Employee”
  • BP role “Organizational Unit”
  • BP role “Internet User”

OBJECTIVES OF THE BUSINESS PARTNER APPROACH

  • The SAP S/4HANA Business Partner model aims to achieve the following objectives:
  • Time savings by avoiding data redundancy when sharing common data across different roles
  • More flexibility through the various business partner concepts, such as differentiating business partner types into organizations, individuals, and groups or taking on different roles as a business partner
  • Cost reduction through a harmonized system architecture

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS FOR THE BUSINESS PARTNER MODEL

STANDARDIZATION

The shared use of business partners across multiple organizational units such as purchasing, sales, invoicing, and contract management requires a higher degree of data standardization and their use.

RULES AND REGULATIONS

The use and content of selected fields, as well as corporate-wide quality requirements, must be defined by a rule set. It is recommended to define the rule set on a country-specific basis. This rule set should also include points that were often inadequately regulated or varied by business area in the past but are not directly related to the transition to the business partner approach, such as specifications for address data (including the use of abbreviations) and clearly defined roles and permissions in the data maintenance process.

DATA OWNER

Within the rule set, it must be determined who the “owner” of the data is, who is authorized to make changes, who needs to approve them, and who needs to be informed. These rights are often assigned to different groups and roles depending on the data area. Particularly with regard to personal data, it is essential to ensure compliance with high data protection requirements through permissions during maintenance and operational access. The transition to the business partner approach offers the opportunity to define clear rules here, which should be established and coordinated before the transition, as data cleansing afterward would be very time-consuming.

WORKFLOW FOR CREATING BUSINESS PARTNERS

The business partner logic influences the upgrade path from SAP ERP to S/4HANA. The Customer-Vendor Integration (CVI) is a prerequisite for upgrading to on-premise SAP S/4HANA. All customers and vendors must be transferred to business partners. Additionally, customer- and vendor-specific transactions have been discontinued. The transaction BP is the central entry point for creating, changing, and displaying business partners, customer, and vendor master data in SAP S/4HANA.a.

BUSINESS PARTNER IN SAP S/4HANA

The business partner logic influences the upgrade path from SAP ERP to S/4HANA. The Customer-Vendor Integration (CVI) is a prerequisite for upgrading to on-premise SAP S/4HANA. All customers and vendors must be transferred to business partners. Additionally, customer- and vendor-specific transactions have been discontinued. The transaction BP is the central entry point for creating, changing, and displaying business partners, customer, and vendor master data in SAP S/4HANA.

MIGRATING VENDOR DATA TO S/4HANA

If LSMW (Legacy System Migration Workbench) was used in earlier SAP ERP systems, this tool is no longer recommended for the on-premise version and not available for the cloud version.

CONCLUSION

The SAP Business Partner concept increases data quality by avoiding redundant data. However, using business partners requires stronger harmonization, a rule set, and clearly defined responsibilities.