Successful migration to SAP S/4HANA. Do you know where to start with the migration of vendors, business partners, and customers?

Are you planning or preparing for a migration to SAP S/4HANA and unsure where to start with migrating your Vendors, Business Partners, and Customers? In this blog, we’ll explore the Customer/Vendor integration in SAP S/4HANA.

Customer/Vendor integration in SAP S/4HANA

Data migration from ECC (or Business One R/3) to S/4HANA can be quite a challenge, especially when it comes to your customer and vendor records. In ECC, users had the choice between customer/vendor objects or the Business Partner object. Many SAP users opted for the former, focusing on separate customer and vendor objects.

In S/4HANA, SAP has shifted to exclusively using the Business Partner (BP) object. The main advantage of this approach is centralized management of master data. The BP serves as the starting point for creating, modifying, or displaying a Business Partner, customer, or vendor.

Key Benefits of Using Business Partners in S/4 HANA:
• A Business Partner represents a single legal entity.
• No need for multiple account numbers for a customer who is also a vendor.
• A Business Partner can have multiple roles (e.g., both customer and vendor).
• The ‘General Data’ tab is shared across roles, while specific data is stored within each role.
• Data can be maximally shared and reused, which leads to simplified data.
• Business Partner categories include Organization, Person, and Group.
• Various relationships between Business Partners can be defined (e.g., “has contact person”, “is sales rep for”).
• A Business Partner can have multiple addresses.
• It offers a harmonized architecture across applications.

Data quality and tools for CVI
To use the SAP Business Partner as the primary object in S/4HANA, you must leverage the Customer-Vendor Integration (CVI). CVI ensures synchronization between the Business Partner object and the Customer/Vendor objects. High data quality is essential for effective CVI. Ideally, standardization and harmonization of master data should be part of your new process design.

SAP’s Migration Cockpit provides control reports, but these validations must be manually processed in the data files. SAP also offers a tool called SAP Data Quality Management (DQM) for data cleansing. However, SAP DQM is not a low-code/no-code application and may require significant setup to support data migration.

In a previous blog, “Upgrading to SAP S/4HANA? Improve Your Data Quality as Well,” my colleague Erkan Kopuz discussed additional tools that can help migrate both master and transactional data from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA while enhancing data quality.

For example, using applications like Precisely Studio or Process Runner as ETL tools allows you to automate and optimize processes for creating data objects. You can extract customer and vendor data from ECC into Excel, clean the data, and then upload the Business Partners directly into S/4HANA via a mass upload with validation.

An added benefit of these no-code applications is that they can continue to be used post-migration to automate processes and maintain high-quality master data in SAP.

Need help migration from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA?
Migrating from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA involves a lot of complexities. Do you need assistance or want to improve your data quality? Are you unsure where to start with migrating your customer base, vendor base, and contacts to S/4HANA? Or would you like to see how process automation can benefit your organization. Feel free to contact us, and together we’ll find the best options for your situation. We’re here to help!

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