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Background documentationBusiness Partners

 

Business partners are parties in which your company has a business interest.

Business partners are used to represent a person or user or an organization that is involved in message processing, for example, as reporter, processor, or sold-to party. Business partners are used in all IT Service Management transactions types. When creating business partners, you provide general information such as name and address.

Business partners are structured as follows:

  • Business partner categories

    • Person is an individual.

    • Organization represents an entity such as a company or organizational unit.

  • Business partner roles

    The roles you assign to a business partner reflect the business functions it has and the business transactions in which it will be involved.

    You can assign more than one business partner role to a business partner.

  • Business partner relationships

    A business partner relationship is a business-relevant connection between two business partners. For example, person X has relationship is contact person of with organization Y.

Roles in IT Service Management
Reporter

Also called message reporter, business user, reported-by user, end user, or key user

The person who reports incidents.

Dispatcher

The employee who is in charge of creating an incident message if end users report incidents by telephone or similar. Dispatchers also forwards incidents to processors and can confirm solved incidents.

Processor

The employee who is in charge of processing the incidents.

Administrator

The employee who configures IT Service Management and configures the specific scenarios.

Single Point of Contact

The person who remains responsible for the complete lifecycle of an incident, regardless of the support team or organization to which the message is forwarded. You assign the single point of contact (SPOC) role before forwarding the message.

In Customizing, you can also specify that the first processor to receive the message automatically receives the SPOC role. In addition, the SPOC can confirm the message at the end of processing, for example, if the reporter contacted support by phone.

Sold-To Party

The owner of a managed object. In most cases, the sold-to party is the company or organization that purchased the managed object, for example, a technical system or host.

Support Team

The organizational unit that is in charge of processing the messages.

Activities

Creating Business Partners

You can create business partners manually using the Maintain Business Partner transaction (BP), and you can use reports to automatically create and update business partners for the reporter role.

Prerequisites

Make sure that the following mandatory automatic activities are executed successfully in SAP Solution Manager Configuration, in the Basic Configuration scenario, Configure Automatically step:

  • Prepare Business Partner Change

  • Generate Business Partner Screen

Creating Business Partners in the Standard Scenario

Use the Create User or Business Partners Automatically transaction (BP_USER_GEN).

For more information, see Creating Users and Business Partners Automatically.

Creating Business Partners in the IT Service Provider Scenario

Use the Generate Business Partners and System Users for IT Service Providers report.

For more information, see Generating Business Partners and Users for IT Service Providers.

Manually Creating Business Partners

If you create business partners in the Maintain Business Partner transaction, make sure that you configure the following:

Reporter

  • Business partner category: person

  • Business partner roles:

    • Business Partner (Gen.), Financial Services BP; these roles are created by default when creating a person directly in transaction Maintain Business Partner.

    • If the reporter should also have access to the SAP Solution Manager system, add the business partner roles Contact Person (for working with the WebClient UI) and Employee.

  • Managed systems from which the message reporter can report incidents (IDType CRM001): In the business partner role Business Partner (Gen.), on the Identification tab page, enter the managed systems in screen area Identification numbers.

  • In the business partner role Employee, on the Identification tab, enter the SU01 user in the User Name field.

Processor, Dispatcher, Administrator, Single Point of Contact

  • Business partner category: person

  • Business partner roles: Business Partner (Gen.), Financial Services BP, Contact Person, Employee

  • In the business partner role Employee, on the Identification tab, enter the SU01 user in the User Name field.

Sold-To Party

  • Business partner category: organization

  • Business partner roles: Business Partner (Gen.), Financial Services BP, Sold-To Party

  • Configuring Business Partner (Gen.)

    • In the standard scenario: On the Identification tab page, Identification Numbers screen area, the customer number of your company with ID Type SP0001.

    • In the service provider scenario: On the Identification tab page, Identification Numbers screen area, ID Type SP0001 and ID Type SP1001 with the same SAP customer number.

    • In the software partner scenario: Every time an incident (for component XX-PART*) is reported in your SAP Solution Manager system, a business partner of category organization is created that represents the customer number that created the incident.

Support Team Partner

If configured, the system creates this business partner when you create an organization model in the WebClient UI.

  • Business partner category: organization

  • Business partner roles: Business Partner (Gen.), Financial Services BP, Organization Unit

For more information about the configuration, see SAP Note 550055Information published on SAP site EBP/CRM: New integration for business partner.

Assigning Business Partner Numbers

When creating a business partner, the system assigns a business partner number.

  • By default the system assigns an internal number. This means that the system assigns a consecutive number from a number range that is defined by the account group.

  • With external number assignment, you define a number range that allows for alphanumerical number assignment. The system checks whether the number you enter is unique and within the number range defined by the account group.

    For information about configuring external number assignment, see the Customizing under Start of the navigation path SAP Customizing Implementation Guide Next navigation step Cross- Application Components Next navigation step SAP Business Partner Next navigation step Business Partner Next navigation step Basic Settings Next navigation step Number Ranges and Groupings End of the navigation path.

Creating Business Partner Relationships

  1. In Maintain Business Partner, display a business partner.

  2. Choose Relationships and configure the relationships the business partner has to other business partners.

  3. Save your entries.

More Information

For more information about business partners in SAP Customer Relationship Management, see Business Partners in the SAP Library for SAP Customer Relationship Management in the SAP Help Portal, under Start of the navigation path http://help.sap.com/crmInformation published on SAP site Next navigation step <current release> Next navigation step Application Help Next navigation step Master Data End of the navigation path.