Lesson 4 of 5
Customer-vendor integration
7 min
Customer-vendor integration (CVI) is the mechanism that connects the business partner to the customer and supplier records that sales, purchasing and finance still use. You never run it as a user, but it explains a lot of behavior, and it is a non-negotiable step in any conversion from SAP ECC.
What CVI does
When you save a business partner with a customer role, CVI creates or updates the linked customer record; with a supplier role, the linked supplier record. The link is one to one: a BP has at most one customer and one supplier. General data such as name, address and bank details flow from the BP to the linked records; role data flows to the corresponding company code, sales area and purchasing segments.
- Maintain BPUser saves Great Lakes Fleet Services in BP or a Fiori app
- CVI synchronizationRuns in the background as part of the save
- Customer recordGeneral, company code and sales area data updated
- Processes read itSales orders, billing, dunning and payments use the customer data
In SAP S/4HANA the leading object is the BP: you maintain the BP and the customer and supplier records follow. During an ECC conversion, the direction is the opposite for a while: existing customers and vendors are used to create business partners.
CVI and the ECC conversion
A system conversion from ECC to SAP S/4HANA requires every customer and vendor to have a business partner before the technical conversion. That means activating CVI in the ECC system, cleansing the data, setting up the mapping (account groups to groupings, number assignment, roles), and running a synchronization so all customers, vendors and their contact persons get business partners. SAP provides the CVI cockpit (transaction CVI_COCKPIT in recent ECC support packages) to guide preparation, the load and the follow-up checks. The conversion checks will not let the project proceed while unsynchronized customers or vendors remain.
- Months beforeData cleansingRemove duplicates, archive unused records, fix addresses, tax numbers and bank details in ECC
- PreparationCVI configurationMap account groups to groupings, decide number assignment, map roles
- SynchronizationLoad business partnersCreate BPs for all customers, vendors and contact persons; resolve errors
- Before conversionReadiness checkNo unsynchronized records remain; new records are created through CVI
- ConversionTechnical conversion to SAP S/4HANABP becomes the leading object from now on
When synchronization fails
CVI checks the data it writes. If a mandatory customer field is empty, or a value is invalid for the target record, the save fails or the synchronization reports an error, and the BP and the customer or supplier are not in step. Errors from mass loads are typically collected in monitoring tools for the data team to process. As a business user, you notice it as a BP that looks complete but cannot be used in a process, or a customer record missing data you can see on the BP.
What would you do?
Two weeks before Contoso's conversion rehearsal, Luis learns that 400 vendors have no business partner because their addresses failed validation. What is the right call?
- CVI keeps business partners and customer and supplier records synchronized, one to one.
- In SAP S/4HANA the BP is the leading object; customer and supplier records follow.
- A conversion from ECC requires every customer and vendor to have a BP before the technical conversion.
- The CVI cockpit guides preparation, load and checks; data cleansing is usually the long pole.
- Sign off migrated partners with counts, roles, numbers and field-level samples.
Check your understanding · not graded
Lesson check
1. What must be true of customers and vendors before an ECC system is converted to SAP S/4HANA?
2. In SAP S/4HANA, which object do users maintain?
3. What is the relationship between a BP and its customer record?
4. Which SAP tool guides CVI preparation and synchronization in ECC?