Profiles and identifiers

Every B2B scenario in TPM starts with two profiles: yours and your partner's. A profile is the place where everything about one party lives, from the contact person to the identifiers that appear in EDI envelopes. Get the profiles right and agreements become short; get them wrong and every agreement inherits the mistake.

The company profile

The company profile describes your own organization. You maintain it once per tenant, and you can add subsidiaries when different legal entities trade under their own identifiers. For Contoso, the company profile is Contoso Motor Co. If Contoso Parts Distribution LLC (company code 1810) later exchanges EDI under its own identifiers, it becomes a subsidiary in the same profile, and an agreement template can be created with the Create with Company Subsidiary option.

Trading partner profiles

A trading partner profile holds what you need to set up agreements with one partner: business context, contacts, systems, communication parameters, certificates, B2B standards, acknowledgments and the identifiers that recognize the partner in an incoming interchange and fill the envelopes of an outgoing one. In Integration Suite you choose Design > B2B Scenarios, open the Partner Profiles tab and choose Create > Trading Partner. The profile is organized in sections you complete in order:

1. Overview: name, description and basic data.
2. Contacts: the partner's EDI coordinator and escalation contact.
3. Identifiers: the IDs that appear in envelopes, each with its type system and scheme.
4. Business Context: the business processes and context the partner takes part in.
5. Systems: the partner's systems, the type systems and versions they use, and their communication channels (for example the AS2 receiver configuration).
6. Certificates: the partner's public certificates only.
7. Parameters: custom values used by the scenario.
8. Security: inbound security settings such as signature verification against the partner's AS2 ID.
9. Number Ranges: number ranges used for control numbers in outgoing interchanges.

A communication partner profile is a separate kind of profile for AS2-specific configuration. Use it when messages travel through an intermediary such as an AS2 hub or value-added network that is not itself the business partner. An agreement template can include a communication partner with the Include Communication Partner option.

Identifiers: who is who in the envelope

An identifier tells the runtime which party a message belongs to. It is a group of fields:

The scheme together with the type system becomes the identifier code qualifier. In X12 that is the ISA05/ISA07 qualifier next to the ISA06/ISA08 sender and receiver IDs; in EDIFACT it is the qualifier in the UNB sender and recipient. Contoso's identifier is CONTOSOMC with qualifier ZZ in ASC X12; Great Lakes Fleet Services' identifier is GLFLEETEDI, also ZZ. An inbound 850 from Great Lakes therefore carries GLFLEETEDI as interchange sender and CONTOSOMC as interchange receiver, and TPM uses that pair to find the agreement.

When the two parties use different standards, each side needs an identifier in the other side's encoding. SAP's documentation describes the fields Identifier as Trading Partner and Identifier as Company for this case. Suppose a European partner sends EDIFACT while Contoso's back end expects X12-style IDs: the company profile also needs an identifier in UN/EDIFACT encoding so the agreement can match messages from either side.

Certificates and keys: what goes where

AS2 security depends on key pairs, and TPM is strict about where each half lives. Only public certificates are uploaded in a profile's Certificates section. Private keys and user credentials stay in Cloud Integration's security material (Monitor > Manage Security), and the profile refers to them by alias. Contoso's company profile therefore names the private key alias used to decrypt inbound messages and sign MDNs; Great Lakes' profile holds Great Lakes' public certificate so Contoso can verify their signatures and encrypt messages to them.

Aliases, number ranges and transport

Profiles carry objects that must survive a transport from the test tenant to the production tenant. TPM lets you maintain an alias, a tenant-independent name, for identifiers, system instances and communication channels, so references stay intact across tenants. Number ranges provide interchange control numbers for outgoing interchanges and acknowledgments; Contoso keeps one per partner and per direction so a reset in one never collides with another.