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  Parties Involved

Definition

The business partners that are related to the object together with their business functions.

Use

By creating relationships to business partners, you are able to maintain an overview of all parties related in some way to the object. This enables you to record information such as whom a certain house is owned by, and to whom it is leased, or who owns a certain car, and who are its drivers.

A history is available and displays all partner relationships in which the object has been involved. This means that information such as who owned the house in the past, how many times it was sold, and to whom, is not lost and enables the progression of the object through these various stages to be tracked.

Structure

Partner Information

You specify the following data in the Parties Involved assignment block on the Object page:

  • Assigned business partners

  • Corresponding partner functions

    An object can be assigned multiple business partners in different or the same partner functions. A business partner can have several partner functions.

    Example Example

    A car can have a relationship to one business partner with the partner function “Owner”, and several relationships to other business partners with the partner function “Driver”.

    End of the example.
  • Validity period of the relationship

    This time constraint can refer to both the past and future.

  • Main partner

    Where several partners are involved, you can indicate which partner is to be regarded as the main partner, thus from a number of dealers you designate one as the principal dealer.

Partner Determination Procedures

A partner determination procedure can be used as follows:

  • To determine which partner functions can be used when assigning business partners to the object in the Parties Involved assignment block. To do this, you assign a partner determination procedure to the relevant category on the Product Hierarchy page. This option is only available for categories within the base hierarchy.

    To do this, the partner determination procedure has to be set up correctly. You can do this in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management , by choosing Start of the navigation path Basic Functions Next navigation step Partner Processing: End of the navigation path

    • Define Partner Functions

    • Define Partner Determination Procedure

  • To determine the relevant partners during transaction processing. For more information about partner determination, see Partner Processing and Partner Determination Procedures .