Customer Vendor Integration BLOG Part 1 of 3.
This is the first part of a three part blog on SAP CVI (Customer/Vendor Integration). SAP delivers the CVI cockpit to convert customers and vendors to business partners, but there is a lot of preparation that needs to be done.
Converting the customer vendor to a business partner is a mandatory step before the conversion or migration process of S4 HANA, but this can be done well in advance as a separate project. Some of these activities are listed here.
Effects of Overlapping duplicates:
In SAP ECC, customer and vendor masters are created separately. The objective of this activity of finding duplicates is to make a decision on the overall design of Business Partner groupings. For example, if the affected transactions are related to customers rather than vendors, it would be prudent to maintain the same number range for the customer master.
Going forward in SAP ECC as well as in SAP S/4HANA, In Business Partner, customers and vendors are managed as legal entities. Their numbers are then assigned in the respective masters. Customers were assigned a number in the vendor master and vendors were assigned a number in the customer master. This was necessary to handle payments. If there is a customer or vendor with the same number, and a decision is made to change the vendor number, these need to be identified and replaced in the master for smooth conversion. It is therefore critical to acquire the master data’s list of assigned customers and vendors.
Effects of Customizations/Enhancements:
Some clients choose to improve their master data screens and/or enhance customer/vendor tables. To address their business needs, they may, for example, add or remove fields from conventional SAP screens. These custom features do not make it to the new converted business partner when the conversion to Business Partner takes place, and they must be handled. To remedy this, it is necessary to understand what custom enhancements are and the location of these enhancements. It is also important to roadmap how to address these customizations/ enhancements moving forward in business partners.
Standard transaction code in SAP ANST will help collect custom enhancements by entering the transaction codes XD01, XK01, and PA30, which are for customer, vendor, and employee master data development, one at a time. Also, ANST necessitates additional processes till the data is populated. V3CVI adds value over and beyond ANST and allows you to receive this information holistically at once.
Effects of CVI on employee master records:
Vendors that are actually employees should not be converted into “Organization” during the CVI conversion. These must be changed into “Person”. To appropriately allocate number ranges to these employees who have been created as vendors, a list of all these employees created as vendors is required, as well as to ensure that they are converted into persons rather than organization. A developer can do this by searching across numerous tables and sorting by account groups. V3iT’s tool, on the other hand, will populate the data in seconds without the need for a developer or functional consultant.