In SAP ECC, you’ve always worked with Customers, Vendors and Contact Persons. In the modern SAP S/4HANA system, this distinction has been replaced with the more general term ‘Business Partners’: (groups of) persons and organizations in which your company has a business interest. To convert the master data between the legacy system and S/4HANA, SAP introduced Customer-Vendor Integration or CVI. Here’s what you need to know to support your S/4HANA conversion.
Business Partners: A key step in your S/4HANA migration
In SAP S/4HANA, the term “Business Partners” is used to include all the leading master data objects like Customer, Vendor, Contact Persons as well as Employees. A Business Partner can therefore be seen as a person, an organization or group of persons/organizations with a unique identification code. As a result, a business partner in S/4HANA could be a vendor and a customer at the same time, using the same data object number.
But what are the benefits of using "Business Partners" in S/4HANA?
No more redundant data, as there are no longer multiple data objects representing the same party.
It’s easier to make certain calculations, e.g., the total net spend for a specific partner.
Easy integration with SAP CRM, as this solution was the first to use the concept of Business Partners as leading objects.
By cleansing and migrating your data upfront with CVI, you can accelerate your migration to S/4HANA and ensure a smoother transition.
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Since Business Partners are mandatory in SAP S/4HANA, all Customer and Vendor master data in SAP ECC needs to be converted before your SAP S/4HANA migration. This is where SAP’s Customer-Vendor Integration process comes in.
Sounds like a really big deal? It’s not!
A CVI project can be run in SAP ECC as a separate project before the actual S/4HANA project starts off. As a result, the synchronization of business partners will no longer be a critical point in your conversion journey. This also means it won’t have any impact on your day-to-day business after go-live of the CVI project, since the synchronization happens entirely in the background. You can still use Customers, Vendors and Contact Persons with their respective transactions as well.
3 major CVI considerations
CVI projects provide a great opportunity to review your current setup of Customers, Vendors and Contact Persons .
While CVI doesn’t take a lot of time, it is quite technical. A CVI project requires a lot of focus, analysis and error handling of master data. Think about that when preparing your S/4HANA conversion.
Since migrating to SAP S/4HANA is a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’, take into account what the final setup will look like from the start.
How CVI ensured a smooth S/4HANA migration for INEOS
Because every organization has its own setup and use of Customers, Vendors, and Contact Persons, a tailored approach is often necessary. With the right insights and expertise, however, you’re sure to even seize a couple of opportunities along the way. Just ask INEOS.
"CVI ultimately determines your path to SAP S/4HANA,” says Koen Van Audenrode, Project Manager S/4HANA at INEOS. “Sure, it is a mandatory step in the preliminary phase. But it urged us to conduct a major master data exercise and clean-up in SAP ECC. After the initial setup of CVI, we successfully deployed a complete S/4HANA sandbox in just 5 months. Despite the summer period in between, we were able to work exceptionally time- and cost-efficient.”
"Sure, it is a mandatory step in the preliminary phase of an S/4HANA migration. But it urged us to conduct a major master data exercise and clean-up in SAP ECC.”
“Flexso helped us with accurate, step-by-step explanations, clear visualization of options, and prompt feedback on questions. So, we were able to swiftly navigate through the CVI project. The migration of INEOS to S/4HANA has already started off very smoothly and cost-effectively.”
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