Business Partners

Transaction code: BP

SAP defines a business partner in SAP S/4HANA as an organization (company), person or group of people or organizations in which your company has a business interest. A business partner is the leading object in SAP S/4HANA and single point of entry to manage business partners, customers, and suppliers (vendors) master data.

Anyone who works with your company or who you work with is a business partner, for example your customers, suppliers (vendors), sales agents, prospects, contacts, carriers, bank, etc.

Sana Commerce Cloud uses business partners in SAP S/4HANA to create and manage B2C and B2B customers, guests, prospects and contacts. Sales agents can be created in two different ways in SAP S/4HANA, either by creating an employee (PA40) and then extending it by creating a sales representative (VPE1), or by creating a business partner.

There are three categories of business partners:

• Person

• Organization

• Group

According to SAP, the business partner category denotes whether a business partner is a natural person (private individual), organization (legal person/entity or part of a legal entity, such as a department), or a group.

This means that you can create the business partner in SAP S/4HANA as a person, organization, or group. Depending on the business partner category, you will need to fill a certain set of fields with data. These fields may differ depending on the category. The business partner stores every person, organization or group involved in your business.

All customers, B2B and B2C, who can purchase online from the Sana webstore must be created in SAP S/4HANA as business partners of the Organization category as they must be assigned to a certain sales area. Only contacts who have relationships with other customers and sales agents who represent other customers can be created in SAP S/4HANA as business partners of the Person category, but also as Organization.

Business partners in SAP S/4HANA can serve different roles within a company. They can be created in as many roles as needed, such as customer, supplier (vendor), sales agent, prospect, contact, ship-to party, payer, carrier, bank, etc. In SAP S/4HANA you centrally create and manage your business partners and all the roles they serve using the BP transaction. There is a general data which you must enter for all business partner roles and specific data for each role.

When you create a business partner in SAP S/4HANA, each business partner must be also assigned to a grouping. It determines the number range, whether the number is assigned to the business partner by the user manually or by system automatically.

• Internal number range – When you create a business partner, the system automatically assigns the number to the partner.

• External number range – When you create a business partner, you must enter the external number for the partner manually.

For B2C customers, guests and prospects you must use the grouping with the internal number range. That is because B2C customers, guests and prospects are created online from the Sana webstore and are saved to SAP S/4HANA. That is why the system must automatically assign numbers to the customers and prospects when they are created online from the webstore.

For B2B customers you can use the grouping with the external number range because B2B customers are created directly in SAP S/4HANA by the SAP user. Therefore, the SAP user can enter the external customer number manually when creating a B2B customer in SAP S/4HANA.

To create customers, prospects, contacts and sales agents in SAP S/4HANA you can use the standard BP roles and grouping as well as create your own custom BP roles and grouping.

When the business partner is created, you cannot change the grouping.

Customers in Reference Sales Areas

Sana Commerce Cloud supports customer accounts for reference divisions (TVKOS) and distribution channels (TVKOV). In SAP S/4HANA you can specify a division where you can create customer accounts and share them with other divisions. One division is used as a source of customer accounts for other divisions. It allows to manage customer master data in one place.

To view the reference divisions, in SAP S/4HANA call the transaction General Table Display (SE16N), then enter TVKOS in the Table field and click Execute.

To view the distribution channels, in SAP S/4HANA call the transaction General Table Display (SE16N), then enter TVKOV in the Table field and click Execute.