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Different characteristics indicating the status of a business partner.

 

Status

Status information indicates whether a business partner:

  • Can be contacted.

  • Is to be archived. This means that the business partner can be archived during the next archiving run, provided the archiving check shows that there are no active business transactions using this business partner data. If this is not the case, archiving is prevented even if the archiving indicator is set.

    If the check shows that the business partner can be archived, it is assigned the status "logically deleted", and can no longer be used in business processes nor changed manually or by BAPIs. The next archiving run writes the record to the archive and physically deletes it.

    For more information, see Archiving Business Partners.

  • Is blocked centrally, and therefore certain activities cannot be executed.

  • Is not released for business processes because its data still needs to be checked.

  • Has been blocked for the following processes:

    • Business transactions, with blocking reasons such as no sales

    • Delivery, with blocking reasons such as credit limit, change in quantity, bottleneck

    • Billing, with blocking reasons such as check credit or debit memo, check terms of payment, prices incomplete

      Note Note

      You can set the blocks company-wide or in selected sales areas. The sales area-dependent blocks are valid in addition to the central block.

      End of the note.

    You define blocking reasons in Customizing for Customer Relationships Management, by choosing   Master Data   Business Partner   Status Management   Define Blocking Reasons  .

Life Cycle

A life cycle stage enables you to record the different stages of a business partner as it progresses through its life cycle, with each stage representing a different view at a particular point in time. For example, a business partner might start off as a potential, move on to an intermediate stage as a prospect, before finally becoming a customer.

A life cycle stage is technically a business partner role. The assignment of stages to a life cycle is defined using the functionality provided by role exclusion groups. A life cycle therefore corresponds to a role exclusion group. These contain a range of roles that are mutually exclusive.

This means that only one business partner role in an exclusion group can be assigned to a business partner at any one time. This ensures that the assignment of roles from a role exclusion group to a business partner is unambiguous. Assigning a role which belongs to a role exclusion group is therefore the same as assigning a unique status.

To enable a sequence of statuses, you can define transitions between the roles contained in a role exclusion group, thus defining the order in which the life cycle stages occur. In this way you can prevent a business partner from omitting a stage or returning to a previous stage.

You define a life cycle, stages, and sequence in Customizing. You also have the following options:

  • Screen control: Using a Business Add-In (BAdI), you can use the life cycle stage as a criterion for hiding or displaying certain assignment blocks.

  • Field modification: Using a BadI, you can influence the fields in the account details based on the life cycle stage, for example, to display additional fields, or make fields mandatory or optional.

  • Initial life cycle stage: You can default the initial life cycle stage when accounts are created.

  • Search criterion: You can search for accounts by life cycle stage.

For more information, see in the Implementation Guide   Customer Relationship Management   Master Data   Business Partner   Define Basic Settings for Account Life Cycle  

Note Note

The account life cycle is delivered as hidden function and has to be activated in the configuration tool.

End of the note.