Every customer converting their system to SAP S/4HANA (On-Premise or Private Cloud) needs to go through the CVI process (Customer Vendor Integration) and migrate to Business Partner from the classical ECC customer / vendor data model.
The migration process to Business Partner besides the configuration part also addresses the master data quality of Customers and Vendors, as it creates Business Partner from existing data.
This part of the process usually brings up a lot of master data inconsistencies, and key among them is the address data. Correcting and solving those inconsistencies poses a significant challenge and an additional time variable to a project to any customer converting their system to S/4HANA.
Luckily there is a solution and that is called SAP DQM (Data Quality Management).
SAP Data Quality Management version for SAP Solutions (DQM for SAP) offers the below capabilities:
Master data consistency check (transaction code CVI_PRECHK) report can use DQM to cleanse the address details and ease the system conversion process. DQM can only be called when the DQM Add-on is present in the system. Kindly go over the following note for more details on the CVI_PRECHK report: https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2743494
As said above the DQM add-on check integrates directly to the CVI_PRECHK and helps customers identify and resolve any potential issues directly in ECC. However, the solutions to the issues uncovered by the tool are being received from the SAP Business Technology Platform as DQM besides the add-on part is actually a microservice delivered by SAP within the SAP Extension Suite*.
The picture below details how the process actually works:
Having said that DQM is currently capable of:
How does it work?
Please check out notes
The notes above direct you to the DQM add-on install, however you also need to configure the connection to the DQM Microservice as shown in the above-mentioned diagram.
! Please note that to use SAP DQM Microservices you would need a subscription to SAP Extension Suite* (* together with SAP Integration Suite, the Extension Suite is previously known as SAP Cloud Platform). If you do not know if you already have an appropriate license, please contact your account manager from SAP to get information on how to get an ability to use SAP DQM Microservice. You can find more information on SAP DQM Microservice, it’s service plan as well as further services of Extension as well as Integration Suites in SAP Discovery Center: SAP DQM Microservice.
In order to facilitate the entire installation (add-on install and establishing the appropriate connection) please get in contact with your technical resource and kindly go through the steps provided in this guide: https://help.sap.com/viewer/bc498e07313f4195be1d53104b03b2cf/4.1/en-US/0cd8860ec0334163ab4c1852e78ac...
2. Please click below the RUN ID the line below as the
3. We are now presented with all the master data errors that need fixing from the Customer side.
! Please note that we are looking at a SAP demo system!
If we look more closely, we can differentiate between the kind of errors we can get help from DQM, for example:
4. As we have a lot of errors in our system, we need to only select the Address ones, therefor the next step is to click on the edit button and on the Address option
5. As soon as we click on the Edit—Address we immediately see that the fields are now editable:
! Please pay close attention to Column Adr Ch.!
The different statuses are:
C - Validated address. DQM was able to validate and correct the address.
D - Invalid address. DQM was not able to validate the address due to multiple or no address suggestions. You need to correct the address manually.
Blank - Address not validated by DQM. You need to correct the address manually.
We can only correct address data that has either a Blank or a D .
6. We are now at phase of correcting the data, therefor let us select for example second line and click on Fix Ambiguous Address
We are prompted with a pop-up, where we need to push Next:
We are now presented with possible address; therefore, we need to select one and click on Select
Right now, we are almost done with the address correction, however we are prompted again with a pop-up showing us the changes we made and giving us the options to proceed, and if everything is ok Accept the Validate Address
After accepting the proposed address, we can now the status of the line has changed from D to C (Validated Address):
We can now move on to the next issue and fix it. Of course, we also have the option to Mass Populate by selecting more or all objects and click on:
The example above was just one of the many possible issues we might encounter that need to be corrected before the Business Partner Synchronization, and with the help of DQM the process is much easier than before.
In conclusion one of the most difficult variables of the CVI to assess and fix has now been addressed with the SAP DQM Microservices which not only identifies the address issues, but also corrects it.
Leveraging this service offering will not only give you peace of mind from a Conversion Project perspective and timeline, but it will also eliminate a possibly substantial risk and extensive work and resource planning in manually correcting master data.
As a final point please be aware that implementing the DQM Add-on could also trigger address checks during new Customer/Vendor creation via the XD/XK transactions. Thus, please pay very close attention when installing the add-on and using it in a live system. Always test any new implementation first in a sandbox or development system.
Thank you for reading and please stay tuned for upcoming updates.
The migration process to Business Partner besides the configuration part also addresses the master data quality of Customers and Vendors, as it creates Business Partner from existing data.
This part of the process usually brings up a lot of master data inconsistencies, and key among them is the address data. Correcting and solving those inconsistencies poses a significant challenge and an additional time variable to a project to any customer converting their system to S/4HANA.
Luckily there is a solution and that is called SAP DQM (Data Quality Management).
SAP Data Quality Management version for SAP Solutions (DQM for SAP) offers the below capabilities:
- Corrects and/or validates the address based on referential data sources;
- Formats the address according to norms of the applicable country.
Master data consistency check (transaction code CVI_PRECHK) report can use DQM to cleanse the address details and ease the system conversion process. DQM can only be called when the DQM Add-on is present in the system. Kindly go over the following note for more details on the CVI_PRECHK report: https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2743494
As said above the DQM add-on check integrates directly to the CVI_PRECHK and helps customers identify and resolve any potential issues directly in ECC. However, the solutions to the issues uncovered by the tool are being received from the SAP Business Technology Platform as DQM besides the add-on part is actually a microservice delivered by SAP within the SAP Extension Suite*.
The picture below details how the process actually works:
Having said that DQM is currently capable of:
- Address cleansing only for the inconsistent customers and vendors in ECC and NOT on the entire address records of ADRC
- Execute batch call to DQM micro-service for inconsistent address records
- Get proposals from DQM (in batch) and view the changes before committing to DB
- Inline editing of proposal for any special cases before committing to DB
- Address consistency check for C/V records is based on OY17 configuration
- Default address to some standard value (per country) just to expedite the conversion (only in sandbox)
How does it work?
- First step is to have all the notes needed for the CVI process as detailed in the CVI Cookbook implemented in your SAP ECC system
- Second step is that we need to implement the DQM Add-on to ensure functionality with the CVI_PRECHK report.
Please check out notes
The notes above direct you to the DQM add-on install, however you also need to configure the connection to the DQM Microservice as shown in the above-mentioned diagram.
! Please note that to use SAP DQM Microservices you would need a subscription to SAP Extension Suite* (* together with SAP Integration Suite, the Extension Suite is previously known as SAP Cloud Platform). If you do not know if you already have an appropriate license, please contact your account manager from SAP to get information on how to get an ability to use SAP DQM Microservice. You can find more information on SAP DQM Microservice, it’s service plan as well as further services of Extension as well as Integration Suites in SAP Discovery Center: SAP DQM Microservice.
In order to facilitate the entire installation (add-on install and establishing the appropriate connection) please get in contact with your technical resource and kindly go through the steps provided in this guide: https://help.sap.com/viewer/bc498e07313f4195be1d53104b03b2cf/4.1/en-US/0cd8860ec0334163ab4c1852e78ac...
- Third step is to run the CVI_PRECHK and assess what errors we have and how can DQM help us in fixing them. For this let’s go through the steps and screenshots below:
- Go to Transaction CVI_PRECHK and select all relevant Business Checks(the Address checkbox is mandatory for this exercise) based on the entity you wish to search (as an example Customer), and of course press Execute
2. Please click below the RUN ID the line below as the
3. We are now presented with all the master data errors that need fixing from the Customer side.
! Please note that we are looking at a SAP demo system!
If we look more closely, we can differentiate between the kind of errors we can get help from DQM, for example:
4. As we have a lot of errors in our system, we need to only select the Address ones, therefor the next step is to click on the edit button and on the Address option
5. As soon as we click on the Edit—Address we immediately see that the fields are now editable:
! Please pay close attention to Column Adr Ch.!
The different statuses are:
C - Validated address. DQM was able to validate and correct the address.
D - Invalid address. DQM was not able to validate the address due to multiple or no address suggestions. You need to correct the address manually.
Blank - Address not validated by DQM. You need to correct the address manually.
We can only correct address data that has either a Blank or a D .
6. We are now at phase of correcting the data, therefor let us select for example second line and click on Fix Ambiguous Address
We are prompted with a pop-up, where we need to push Next:
We are now presented with possible address; therefore, we need to select one and click on Select
Right now, we are almost done with the address correction, however we are prompted again with a pop-up showing us the changes we made and giving us the options to proceed, and if everything is ok Accept the Validate Address
After accepting the proposed address, we can now the status of the line has changed from D to C (Validated Address):
We can now move on to the next issue and fix it. Of course, we also have the option to Mass Populate by selecting more or all objects and click on:
The example above was just one of the many possible issues we might encounter that need to be corrected before the Business Partner Synchronization, and with the help of DQM the process is much easier than before.
In conclusion one of the most difficult variables of the CVI to assess and fix has now been addressed with the SAP DQM Microservices which not only identifies the address issues, but also corrects it.
Leveraging this service offering will not only give you peace of mind from a Conversion Project perspective and timeline, but it will also eliminate a possibly substantial risk and extensive work and resource planning in manually correcting master data.
As a final point please be aware that implementing the DQM Add-on could also trigger address checks during new Customer/Vendor creation via the XD/XK transactions. Thus, please pay very close attention when installing the add-on and using it in a live system. Always test any new implementation first in a sandbox or development system.
Thank you for reading and please stay tuned for upcoming updates.
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