5 tips for your SAP Business Partner implementation
With SAP S/4HANA and especially with the release SAP S/4HANA 1511, the implementation and use of the SAP Business Partner became mandatory for customers and suppliers. If you would like to know more about the SAP Business Partner, please read our article "The SAP Business Partner as an Opportunity". The goal of this article is to give you tips for your SAP Business Partner implementation.
Tip 1: Introduce the SAP Business Partner before your SAP S/4HANA project.
The implementation of the SAP Business Partner must be implemented before your SAP S/4HANA brownfield conversion. But also for other reasons after SAP S/4HANA you should deal with the SAP Business Partner before. How much earlier you dedicate to the project is irrelevant, because you can continue to use your system as usual after the implementation of SAP Business Partner in SAP ECC. This gives you the advantage that a Business Partner is automatically created in the background for each customer, vendor or contact person. Alternatively, you can already use the central transaction "BP" with minor restrictions in SAP ECC and thus replace the previous transactions for maintaining customers and vendors. If you then turn your attention to the SAP S/4HANA project, it is important to check whether a business partner could not be created in the meantime and whether the customizing may need to be changed. In those cases, you need to identify the error, fix it, and synchronize the delta to the business partner.
In addition, you have the advantage of not jeopardizing your SAP S/4HANA project runtime, because implementing SAP Business Partner takes time. Before you can get started, your departments need to understand how it works and what it can do with SAP Business Partner. After that, you need to create a holistic concept for SAP Business Partner that is authoritative for its implementation. If your data quality is not sufficient for the synchronization of customer and vendor master data to SAP Business Partner, then you will have to incur additional expenses in the area of data enrichment and cleansing.
To avoid the likelihood of a project delay in the higher-level SAP S/4HANA project, we advise that you bring forward the implementation of the Business Partner and thus outsource it.
Tip 2: Look at your entire system landscape.
The SAP Business Partner is the central master data object for mapping business relationships. Customer and supplier relationships are only the most prominent examples. In most cases, you do not only keep this master data in your ERP system, which is why it makes sense to consider your system landscape as a whole. This helps you to design the business partner concept in such a way that a later integration of your systems is simplified and the further operation of existing interfaces is secured. A common example is the integration of a CRM system with the ERP system, for example to keep customer master records synchronized or to automate project creation in ERP after order entry. In the supplier environment, supply chain management or external supplier management systems would be considered, for example, to keep supplier master data records in sync here. If a central master data management system is used, its use should also be included in the design.
Take the time to analyze your interfaces and your system landscape so that you can make a decision based on what you already want and need to consider in your business partner concept.
Tip 3: Use the introduction of SAP Business Partner to break away from the old.
Use the Business Partner Introduction to rethink your existing concepts and data sets. Often, the existing structures and concepts for mapping your customer and supplier master data have grown historically and are no longer up-to-date. Therefore, take the time to rethink your concepts. In doing so, it is important to check whether all account groups used still need to remain. Most of the time, you will find redundant or no longer used account groups that resulted from migrations or old business cases. An account group provides for the control of the screen layout, the assignment of the number interval and the authorization control.
In most cases, the existing concept can be simplified. It must be said that, for example, when merging account groups, there may be additional migration effort. This is manageable in most cases and will help you to streamline and standardize your system in the long term.
In addition to old customizing settings, old databases are often no longer needed. We are talking about customers or suppliers with whom no business has been done in the past three to five years. This is a question that you must answer for yourself as a whole, because you must be able to answer this question at the latest when you start your S/4 project. In general, it is a good idea to keep the amount of data as small as possible in order to keep hosting costs low. One to three comparison periods are recommended. If you have country or industry-specific requirements for more history, then you must continue to meet these. The old system with the old data must be archived anyway in accordance with the legal regulations in order to ensure comparability of the systems and data.
The SAP Business Partner promotes standardization and centralization in your system. Our tip is therefore: Don't let old structures prevent you from taking full advantage of SAP Business Partner.
Tip 4: Increase your data quality in the long term!
To be able to implement the SAP Business Partner, the customer and supplier master data should be complete and unique. For this purpose, your master data must be cleansed of duplicates and then enriched with data as part of the project. With the duplicate cleansing, master data maintenance processes should be recorded, documented and redefined, and governance should be established.
This not only involves topics such as checking duplicates and defining mandatory fields, but also the definition of new maintenance processes. As already described in our article "The SAP Business Partner as an Opportunity", the existing transactions for the maintenance of customer, vendor and contact master data in SAP S/4HANA will be replaced by the central transaction "BP". This forces your internal departments to jointly use one central transaction for only one master data object. You should therefore consider whether an organizational centralization of the maintenance process makes sense for you.
Tip 5: The implementation of SAP Business Partner is not a technical changeover
In conclusion, it must be said that the changeover to SAP Business Partner is not a purely technical changeover and we therefore advise you to accompany the change and to involve all stakeholders from the very beginning. The introduction of SAP Business Partner fundamentally changes the maintenance processes for customer, supplier and contact master data, and the cleansing and enrichment of master data requires a great deal of specialist expertise and time. All administrative departments are involved in the process, from concept development and data cleansing to the conversion to SAP Business Partner. They have to jointly agree on a goal and implement it. Therefore, be sure to follow our last tip:
Engage all stakeholders from the beginning and make sure they all understand the goal and value-add behind the project.