The business object business partner is a natural person, organization, group of natural persons, or group of organizations in which a company has a business interest. A business partner may also be a person, organization, or group within a company.

A business partner can have several functions at one time. The meaning of functions is defined by function types. A function type, for example, may be a sold-to party, sales party, payer, or payee.

A business partner can have relationships with other business partners. The meaning of relationships is defined by relationship types. Relationships, for example, are "is the subsidiary of," "is the contact person for," or "is identical to." A business partner can have several addresses. Addresses are defined by address types. Address types are, for example, delivery address or correspondence address.

One business partner can be assigned other business partners using function determination. These business partners represent the business partner in a certain role. For example, a business partner can be defined as a payee for another business partner.

For more information about business partners, see the SD documentation Basic Functions and Master Data in Sales and Distribution.

In a quality notification, you can record all partners who are affected by the problem described in the notification. This includes the person who reported the quality notification, the persons responsible for processing the notification, and those responsible for processing individual notification tasks. The partner data you can maintain in a notification is predefined for each notification type in Customizing.

The following graphic depicts the roles of partners in notification processing.

Partners can be:

• Internal partners (for example, internal employees or partners in the HR Human Resources system)
• External partners (for example, customers, vendors, or manufacturers)

The various partner types can be subdivided into partner functions. The partner function defines the rights, responsibilities and tasks of each partner during the processing of a business transaction.

The partner determination procedure specifies which partners can be assigned to a quality notification and which partner functions are possible for processing a particular business function. Your system administrator defines the partner determination procedure in Customizing.