Business Partner 

Use

Enterprise Buyer professional edition uses the SAP Business partner concept. An internal or external business partner is created in Enterprise Buyer for every person, organization, or group of people, who could be involved in a business transaction. Within the context of business transactions, for example a bid invitation or a purchase order, business partners can adopt various partner functions, as long as they have fulfilled the relevant requirements.

Business partners aggregate the master data of a person, organization or group of people. For more detailed information on the business partner concept, see Business Partners in the CRM documentation.

Prerequisites

Menu path in the Implementation Guide (IMG): Enterprise Buyer professional edition ® Application-Specific Basic Settings ® Define Partner Functions

Features

The following partner function types for an external business partner exist in Enterprise Buyer:

Companies that can submit bids in response to a bid invitation

Business partner from whom goods and services can be obtained

Companies that operate a portal on the Internet, for example for industry-specific bid invitations

A specific contact person from the bidder, vendor, or portal company

Part of the company from where the goods are shipped.

Business partner that sends the invoice.

The following partner function types for an internal business partner exist in Enterprise Buyer:

Employees in a company that request their requirement. Requirement coverage requests can also be created on behalf of other employees.

Employees in a company that confirm goods receipt or performance of service

Part of the company where the goods are delivered.

Business partner to whom the invoice is sent.

Using the partner function, the corresponding business partner is assigned to the relevant documents of the business transaction. See also Editing Addresses

Internal Business Partner

These are created for an organizational unit or employee in the organizational structure. When a business partner is created for an employee, this business partner is assigned to the relevant organizational unit within the organizational structure.

The employee relationship to the business partner of the associated organizational unit is created for the internal user’s business partner. For example, when creating the business partner for employee MILLER, the employee relationship to the business partner of the organizational unit Sales is determined. The employee relationship covers the employee’s business address that is used when goods are delivered.

External Business Partner

These are created in the organizational structure underneath the central organizational unit for a vendor, bidder or portal bidder. For every external employee of a vendor, bidder or portal bidder, a contact person is created in addition to the business partner for that company.

Alongside the external user’s business partner, the relationship of the contact person to the business partner of the associated organizational unit for that company is created. The relationship of the contact person covers the business address of the corresponding contact person.

Partner Processing

Through partner processing, the dynamic structure of the partner functions is formed for the different business transactions in Enterprise Buyer system. As a result an internal employee can adopt the partner function Requester or Goods recipient, when creating a shopping cart.

The partner functions Vendor, Vendor’s contact person, Requester, appear, for example, in the header or item documents of a purchase order.

A semantic and syntactic check of the entered data is performed automatically in partner processing.

Amongst other things it checks whether the business partner may adopt the assigned partner function.