This blog post discusses the simplification brought about in SAP S/4HANA 2021 regarding maintaining customers (business partners) with multiple delivery and billing addresses.
We started learning simplifications with advent of SAP S/4HANA. The most critical aspect for Order-to-Cash processes in Master data area was the mandatory introduction of Business Partners. Although Business Partners existed prior to S/4HANA in systems such as CRM, FSCM, it became mandatory to use these on S/4HANA to create customers and vendors. It was here that Consultants learnt Customer Vendor Integration (CVI), setup in Greenfield implementations and processes to migrate existing customers and vendors to Business Partners in S/4HANA Brownfield conversions.
Master Data migration and mapping to appropriate SAP structures is of paramount importance to success of any project. Without a solid functional understanding of the master data structures and their linkage to the core processes, a project implementation is bound to fail.
A typical requirement for clients dealing with large customers is to ship goods to multiple locations of the customer. Also it may be required to send invoice to multiple billing addresses. Naturally here clients are mandated to capture all the regular delivery addresses and billing addresses. Although it was possible to maintain multiple addresses for a Business Partner with different address usages (Delivery Address, Billing address, etc.), these were not linked to the Customer Master record. Since in Logistics (E.g. sales transactions), the customer master tables are used, clients were required to set up separate master records for the different addresses (E.g. Separate ship-to-party records for each shipping location, separate bill-to-party records for each billing address) although these belonged to the same ordering entity.
We can imagine the volume of redundant master data creation in cases of customers with large number of locations for an entity. Creating multiple ship-to-party and bill-to-party records and mapping same to customer master records of sold-to-party was a daunting task during data migration.
With SAP S/4HANA 2021, SAP has introduced linkage of Business Partner addresses and address usages to Customer Master record used in logistics transactions. Now it is no longer required to create multiple customer master records of an entity purely for different addresses. A single Business partner record shall map to a single customer via CVI, which shall have capability to capture desired ship-to and bill-to address in sales transaction.
Pre-requisite:
Below lightweight business functions need to be activated to achieve this functionality.
BPCUSTOMER_MULTIPLE_ADDRESSES
Q2C_MULTIPLE_BP_ADDRESSES
Please ensure to maintain relevant configurations for required partner functions in sales order as mentioned in the configuration guide in the note.
Multiple address functionality is not supported for Payer.
Example:
Business Partner # 1000132 is created. This corresponds to the same customer number via CVI.
2 Addresses are maintained. There is an additional address of New York over and above the standard address of Arizona.
Under Address usage, both addresses are set as possible addresses for Bill-to-Party and Ship-to-Party (Delivery Address)
When creating Sales Order, system issues a pop-up with multiple ship-to and bill-to addresses as maintained for Business Partner.
I have chosen the New York address for these.
Sales Order # 10429 is saved.
As seen, different address is picked up for ship-to-party and bill-to-party for same customer number.
This configuration prevents pain of creating separate ship-to-party and bill-to-party master records and eases customer master maintenance and partner mapping during data migration.
I hope readers find this blog useful for new S/4HANA implementations.
Please share your thoughts and comments.
We started learning simplifications with advent of SAP S/4HANA. The most critical aspect for Order-to-Cash processes in Master data area was the mandatory introduction of Business Partners. Although Business Partners existed prior to S/4HANA in systems such as CRM, FSCM, it became mandatory to use these on S/4HANA to create customers and vendors. It was here that Consultants learnt Customer Vendor Integration (CVI), setup in Greenfield implementations and processes to migrate existing customers and vendors to Business Partners in S/4HANA Brownfield conversions.
Master Data migration and mapping to appropriate SAP structures is of paramount importance to success of any project. Without a solid functional understanding of the master data structures and their linkage to the core processes, a project implementation is bound to fail.
A typical requirement for clients dealing with large customers is to ship goods to multiple locations of the customer. Also it may be required to send invoice to multiple billing addresses. Naturally here clients are mandated to capture all the regular delivery addresses and billing addresses. Although it was possible to maintain multiple addresses for a Business Partner with different address usages (Delivery Address, Billing address, etc.), these were not linked to the Customer Master record. Since in Logistics (E.g. sales transactions), the customer master tables are used, clients were required to set up separate master records for the different addresses (E.g. Separate ship-to-party records for each shipping location, separate bill-to-party records for each billing address) although these belonged to the same ordering entity.
We can imagine the volume of redundant master data creation in cases of customers with large number of locations for an entity. Creating multiple ship-to-party and bill-to-party records and mapping same to customer master records of sold-to-party was a daunting task during data migration.
With SAP S/4HANA 2021, SAP has introduced linkage of Business Partner addresses and address usages to Customer Master record used in logistics transactions. Now it is no longer required to create multiple customer master records of an entity purely for different addresses. A single Business partner record shall map to a single customer via CVI, which shall have capability to capture desired ship-to and bill-to address in sales transaction.
Pre-requisite:
Below lightweight business functions need to be activated to achieve this functionality.
BPCUSTOMER_MULTIPLE_ADDRESSES
Q2C_MULTIPLE_BP_ADDRESSES
Business Functions
Please ensure to maintain relevant configurations for required partner functions in sales order as mentioned in the configuration guide in the note.
Multiple address functionality is not supported for Payer.
Example:
Business Partner # 1000132 is created. This corresponds to the same customer number via CVI.
2 Addresses are maintained. There is an additional address of New York over and above the standard address of Arizona.
Multiple Addresses for business partner
Under Address usage, both addresses are set as possible addresses for Bill-to-Party and Ship-to-Party (Delivery Address)
Address Usages in Business Partner
When creating Sales Order, system issues a pop-up with multiple ship-to and bill-to addresses as maintained for Business Partner.
Sales Order creation
I have chosen the New York address for these.
Sales Order # 10429 is saved.
Sales order partners
As seen, different address is picked up for ship-to-party and bill-to-party for same customer number.
This configuration prevents pain of creating separate ship-to-party and bill-to-party master records and eases customer master maintenance and partner mapping during data migration.
I hope readers find this blog useful for new S/4HANA implementations.
Please share your thoughts and comments.
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