The business partner in SAP S/4HANA

In SAP ECC, customers and vendors were separate master data objects with their own transactions: XD01 for customers, XK01 for vendors, and their accounting and sales or purchasing variants. In SAP S/4HANA, the business partner (BP) is the leading object and the single entry point to maintain business partners, customers and suppliers. The simplification item S4TWL - Business Partner Approach (business impact note 2265093) describes the change and applies to every system conversion.

The business partner model

• Categories: a BP is a person, an organization or a group. The category is set at creation and cannot be changed later.
• Roles: one BP can hold several roles, such as customer, supplier and contact person; the general data is shared by all roles, and role-specific data is stored per role.
• Addresses: several addresses with address usages, and time-dependent addresses, bank data and relationships.
• Relationships: links between BPs, for example a contact person working for an organization.
• Groupings: control the number range of the BP, much like account groups did for customers and vendors.

How customer-vendor integration works

The customer and vendor tables still exist in SAP S/4HANA; many processes read them. Customer-vendor integration (CVI) keeps the BP and the customer or supplier records synchronized. When a BP with a customer role is saved, CVI stores the general data in BP tables, writes the customer-specific data to the customer tables and links the two. In ECC, before conversion, CVI runs the other way: from customer and vendor to BP, so every customer and vendor gets a BP.

SAP is explicit that synchronization must be completed in SAP ERP before the technical conversion starts, and that the conversion pre-checks decline a system where CVI is not in place. SAP also recommends doing CVI well ahead of the conversion project, so it is not part of conversion downtime and not on the critical path. Keeping the BP number equal to the customer and vendor number is recommended but not mandatory.

For a test lead, the BP approach touches far more than master data screens. Every order-to-cash and procure-to-pay test that creates or changes a customer or supplier, every interface that sends partner data, and every report that reads customer or vendor tables is affected. That is why CVI belongs in the regression plan of a conversion from the start, with its own tests for the synchronized data and the changed maintenance.

Worked example: Great Lakes Fleet Services as a business partner

In EP1, Great Lakes Fleet Services is customer 17100001. Its data sits in four places: general data in KNA1 (name, address, tax number), company code 1710 data in KNB1 (reconciliation account, payment terms, dunning), sales area 1710 / 10 / 00 data in KNVV (pricing, shipping, billing), and partner functions in KNVP that point to its ship-tos 17100006 (Grand Rapids depot) and 17100007 (Flint depot). Contact persons, such as the fleet buyer who sends the purchase orders, sit in KNVK. The table shows where each piece ends up after synchronization, with Contoso keeping identical numbers.

Users reach the same data through more than one door. In SAP GUI it is transaction BP; XD01, XK01 and their variants redirect there. In SAP Fiori, Manage Business Partner Master Data (F3163) is the general app, and Manage Customer Master Data (F0850A) and Manage Supplier Master Data (F0794) are role-focused variants. Test each door your users will actually use, because checks and field visibility can differ between the GUI transaction and the apps. In SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition there is no SAP GUI, so only the apps apply.