Lesson 1 of 6
Overview: the sales simplification items
9 min
When Contoso Motor Co. moves from SAP ECC 6.0 EHP 8 to SAP S/4HANA, the sales process does not get rebuilt from scratch. Orders are still orders, deliveries are still deliveries, and the alternators for Great Lakes Fleet Services still ship from plant 1710 Detroit. What changes is a defined list of things SAP has removed, replaced or restructured. SAP calls each of these a simplification item, and the full set for a target release is published in the Simplification Item Catalog.
This course is for the people who have to live with those changes: order-to-cash key users like Maria, process owners, and the testers who will prove the converted process works. It is not a configuration course. The goal is to know which changes touch sales, what they mean in day-to-day work, and where the regression risk sits.
The items that matter most to sales users
| Area | In SAP ECC | In SAP S/4HANA |
|---|---|---|
| Customer master | Customer master records (XD01, VD01) with account groups | Business partner (transaction BP) with customer roles, kept in sync by customer-vendor integration (CVI) |
| Credit management | FI-AR-CR credit management (FD32, credit control area limits) | SAP Credit Management (FIN-FSCM-CR): credit segments, credit accounts on the business partner |
| Rebates | SD rebate agreements and the VBOX rebate index | Settlement Management with condition contracts; old agreements can only be finished |
| Status and flow data | Separate status tables VBUK and VBUP; document index tables | Status fields held on the document header and item tables; index tables no longer used |
| Pricing data | Condition records for documents stored in table KONV | Document conditions stored in a new table (PRCD_ELEMENTS) |
| Output | NAST message control with condition records | SAP S/4HANA output management based on BRF+ rules, with NAST still possible for some documents on-premise |
| Revenue recognition | SD revenue recognition | SAP Revenue Accounting and Reporting |
| Analytics | LIS info structures and classic reports | Embedded analytics on CDS views and Fiori analytical apps |
The sales simplification items business users notice first. The exact list depends on your source and target release.
Not every item affects every customer. Contoso never used SD revenue recognition, so that item is noise for them. They do use rebates heavily with their aftermarket distributors, so the rebate item is a top risk. The first job in any conversion is to filter the catalog down to the items that are relevant to your system.
- Simplification Item CatalogSAP's published list of items per target release, searchable by keyword and line of business
- Readiness checkSAP Readiness Check analyzes the ECC system and reports which items are relevant
- Simplification item checkTechnical checks run before conversion; some items block the conversion until resolved
- Custom code checkCustom code is checked against the simplified data model and deprecated objects
- Impact listRelevant items, owners, actions and the test scenarios each one touches
Finding the items for your system
The catalog lives in the SAP for Me / SAP Support Portal area. You pick the target release, then search by keyword (for example SD Rebate Processing) or filter by line of business, such as Sales. Each item has a short business description and a reference to a detailed SAP Note. Two tools make the list specific to your system. SAP Readiness Check analyzes the ECC system and reports relevant simplification items alongside custom code, add-ons and other findings. The simplification item check, run as part of conversion preparation, executes technical checks; some items must be resolved before the conversion tools will proceed.
For a business team, the useful output is a table: item, relevance, owner, action and the test scenarios it touches. Priya, Contoso's test lead, asks for that table early, because it becomes the backbone of the regression plan in lesson 6.
Public Edition is a different starting point
Everything in this course is about a conversion of an existing ECC system to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition or on-premise. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers start with a new implementation, so they never see the ECC objects at all: they get business partners, SAP Credit Management, Settlement Management and the new output management from day one.
What would you do?
Grace, the PMO lead, asks Maria to confirm by Friday that "sales is not affected" by the conversion, because orders and deliveries look the same in the sandbox. What should Maria do?
- Simplification items are SAP's published list of removed, replaced or restructured functions per target release.
- For sales the big ones are business partner, SAP Credit Management, Settlement Management, the data model, pricing tables and output management.
- SAP Readiness Check and the simplification item check turn the catalog into a system-specific list.
- Turn the relevant items into an impact table with owners and affected test scenarios.
Check your understanding · not graded
Lesson check
1. Where does SAP publish the list of simplification items for a target release?
2. Which tool analyzes an ECC system and reports which simplification items are relevant?
3. What replaces SD rebate agreements in SAP S/4HANA?
4. Why does a Public Edition customer not deal with these conversion items?