SAP Business Partner 

Definition

Organization (firm, branch office), person or a group of persons or organizations in which your company has a business interest.

Use

You can create and manage your business partners centrally for different business transactions.

This is of prime interest if a business partner plays different roles for a company, such as sold-to party and ship-to party.

You can create a business partner in different business partner roles. During the course of the business relationship, the business partner can assume other business partner roles. You do not need to create the general data, which is independent of a business partner’s function or of application-specific extensions, again in each case for this business partner. This prevents data being created and stored redundantly.

Structure

You can use the following basic elements, which form part of the business partner data:

Business Partner Concept

Concept	Remark
Business Partner Category	The data that is available for your business transactions depends on the business partner category.
Business Partner Role	A business partner can take on different business partner roles , which allow different views of the business partner data depending on the business function.
Business Partner Relationship	A relationship connects two business partners and is characterized by the business partner relationship category.
Business Partner Group Hierarchy	You can represent the structure of an organization using the business partner group hierarchy

Integration

For more information on the functions for a business partner, see Processing Business Partner Data.