Partner Determination in Sales and Distribution (SD-BF-PD)
Implementation Options
As part of its business activities, a company has a great deal of contact with natural and legal persons, that work in relation to each other and fulfil different functions.
A customer orders goods from a company. In order to ensure that the goods arrive safely, a forwarding agent may be commissioned with the delivery. A sales employee processes the business transactions in the company.
The component Partner Determination in Sales and Distribution enables you to display the partners involved in the business transaction, their functions and their business relationships in the R/3 system. When creating or processing sales documents, the system can determine the partners automatically.
Integration
Using Other Components in Logistics
In partner determination the system takes data from the business partner master records. In the component hierarchy the business partner master data for Customer and Vendor is assigned to Logistics - General (LO) - Logistics Basic Data: Business Partners - Customer or Vendor.
With Financial Accounting (FI)
As accounting data is always needed for processing a business transaction, sales and distribution data is created for a business partner in a common master record.
From an accounting view there are customers Customers and vendors Creditors. Therefore, customer master data is managed in a customer master record and vendor master data is managed in a creditor master record.
With Human Resources (HR)
The master records for the partner type Personnel (e.g. sales personnel) are maintained in the personnel master record in the application component Human Resources (HR) - Personnel Management (PA). If HR is not used in your company you can also create a personnel master record yourself for employees in sales and distribution. You can find further information in the implementation guide (IMG) for Sales and Distribution under Master Data ®
Business Partners ® Use sales employee without HRFeatures
The function that a partner (natural or legal person) fulfils in a business process is shown in the R/3 system as a partner function.
The component offers various partner functions that are significant for sales and distribution processing. There are also special partner functions for sales support available. If required, you can define new partner functions in Customizing.
You can use partner procedures to assign a group of partner functions in Customizing to each transaction (e.g. billing document).
You can maintain partner relationships in the customer master and in the sales and distribution documents. As a rule there are already partner relationships in the customer master record. When creating a sales document these are automatically created in the document header.
You can change the proposed partner functions in the sales document if this is permitted in Customizing.
In the sales documents, you can define partners at item level as well as header level, if this is allowed in Customizing.