With the introduction of S/4HANA, the use of the business partner becomes obligatory. For that reason SAP is now offering several apps in the Fiori interface for maintenance. In this post we will take a quick look at the most important capabilities for creating and maintaining customer and vendor business partners.
Overview of existing apps
The apps can generally be divided into two groups. On the one hand, there are apps for maintaining the business partner as a whole, and then there is the option to edit the customer and vendor data directly. Here is an overview of the apps including a comparison with the previous SAP-GUI transactions:
| ERP Transaction | S/4HANA App | Object |
| BP | Manage Business Partner | Creation and management of all business partners. App based on the transaction “BP” from the ERP and is simply linked through the “SAP GUI for HTML”. In other words, it is “Fiori-cized”. |
| new in S/4HANA | Manage Business Partner Master Data | New native S/4HANA app for creating and managing all business partners in the system. |
| XD01/XD02/XD03 | Manage customer master data | App for getting started with the maintenance of customer data. The prerequisite is role FLCU00/FLCU01 |
| XK01/XK02/XK03 | Manage Supplier Master Data | App for getting started with the maintenance of vendor data. The prerequisite is role FLVN00/FLVN01 |
Table 1: Comparison of ERP transactions and S/4HANA Apps for business partner maintenance
App “Manage Business Partner”
This app is essentially the “BP” transaction brought over into the Fiori interface. If you’ve already worked with the business parter in the ERP or CRM, you’ll have no problem finding your way here.
Fig. 1: App “Manage Business Partner”
“Manage Business Partner Master Data” App
With this app, business partner maintenance has been redesigned. Although this does provide a modern look and feel, on the one hand, the greater simplicity comes at the cost of a reduction in the number of fields that are available in the standard. Here you have to individually check for each customer whether all the required data inputs have already been provided.
Fig. 2: “Manage Business Partner Master Data” App
Reference for customer and vendor data maintenance
The apps just presented also vary in the way that customer and vendor data is accessed. While in the “Manage Business Partner” app you have to select an additional customer and vendor role in the business partner to display the relevant data, this is no longer necessary in the new app.
Fig. 3: Selection of the role for the appropriate data maintenance
Here these data areas are accessed directly from the role block. All of the maintained roles are clearly listed there, just as they are directly in the results list of the search.
Fig. 4: Accessing customer and vendor data
With this navigation, the relevant maintenance opens for the customer or vendor master data.
With the “Manage Customer Master Data” and “Manage Vendor Master Data” apps, direct navigation to these data areas of the business partners in the Fiori UI is also possible. Comparable to the transactions XD01/02/03 and XK01/02/03. These applications are also native Fiori apps and follow the structure of the app for business partner maintenance. But, as expected, here the sales, purchasing and/or company code data are provided directly for maintenance.
Fig. 5: Purchasing and company code data in the Vendor App