Recommended approach for Business Partner migration

[Former Member]

I'm trying to find a best approach for legacy-to-SAP CRM BP upload, but I'm finding it difficult to get a consensus, probably because it depends on the scenario.

Our situation here is:

- CRM 2007, ECC 6.0, and IS-Banking Solutions for Financial Services 5.0

- CRM replicating BPs out to ECC and IS-Banking

- relatively small data-set for one-time BP migration

- 90% of transformations to be completed in legacy system

So far I've identified the following methods:

1 - External Data Transfer (EDT) with transfer category 013 for financial services (as opposed to 015 for general BP?). Within this process, Direct Input is used with BAPIs and/or IDocs therein. There are a few limitations with EDT as documented in the IMG.

2 - LSMW with BAPIs from Business Object BusinessPartnerFS (or general BP Bus. obj. BusinessPartner?)

3 - LSMW with XIF-related IDocs such as CRMXIF_PARTNER_SAVE

4 - ABAP development with BAPIs identified earlier

Which approach is the generally accepted practice for one-time system migrations? Any major disadvantages/advantages related to your recommendation?

Related - What is the Business Data Toolset and is it relevant for this situation?

Thanks,

Chris

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

Must say - you have really weighed the options very well

Of all these options, the best one is

LSMW with XIF-related IDocs such as CRMXIF_PARTNER_SAVE

Reason :

1. You leave bulk of the processing to the middleware and inbound.

2. More importantly, all the datasets for business partner are supported in this format.

3. Error handlling is easier - its much easier to trace the failed records through the failed idocs.

Why the others aren't so good -

EDT

For business partners ( transfer type 15), EDT is based on the BDT framework. Known issues are performance, lack of flexibility ( you need to create a sender structure - and in case you need to change the scenario a little, then the sender structure will have to be recreated).

Some datasets are not supported in EDT for BP. e.g. IBAN only, status.

ABAP development with BAPIs

Lot of effort in making your Z report. You need to be very careful about filling the structures correctly, doing the error handling, managing performance etc. Also, in case there are issues in this, there aren't too many SAP notes to help you since you have written a custom program.

Instead of taking these pains, let the inbound fill the structures, manage performance, etc. This will also be using the standard tools, so there will be SAP notes to help with errors if any.

I'd suggest the IDOC approach here - its flexible, robust, supports all datasets - and leaves you with less responsibility!

BDT - Business Data Toolkit - is a framework that allows you to build your application on it. BAsically, it provides a template consisting of events that will be executed in a sequence. As an application, you need to register your moduels in these events , and maintain your application specific customizings in the BDT tables. The BDT framework will read the customizing at run time and prepare your application screen, it will call your application modules in sequence to take care of data reading, modification, checks nad save. Its quite an enjoyable topic (!!) but it won't help much in this case.

(The EDT for Business Partner is built on the BDT framework. )

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Rishu.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Rishu, thank you for the excellent response!

One follow-up question regarding LSMW with IDocs:

Am I losing specialized functionality for Financial Services by using the XIF adapter?

Since there is a distinction in the Business Object BAPIs between Business Partner for Financial Services and the mainstream Business Partner, I'm just concerned I will go down the path of IDocs only to find out the XIF adapter doesn't contain the relevant aspects for Financial Services.

Unfortunately, the differences between the two Business Objects are not apparent on the topical level.

Ok, two follow-up questions... Do you know where I can find some detailed documentation on the LSMW with IDocs method?

Thanks again,

Chris

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of the aspects of Financial Services being affected by the XIF adapter.

About the 2nd question - you can find some good information in SAP note 448742.

I hope this helps you!

Cheers,

Rishu.

[Former Member]

Thank you both for your replies. I'll proceed with evaluating the documentation provided.

Chris

[jothivenkatesh_m]

Hi,

I have looked into your query. As stated by Rishu, using LSMW Idoc method will be the perfect choice to migrate the data from Legacy system to CRM system. But again in your last reply you had some confusion on whether this Idoc will be applicable to the Financial services BP.

For this you can go to transaction WE30 or WE60 to see the segments which are used in this Idoc. I think there is a specific segment addressed for Financials also. The segment E101BUS_EI_FINSERV_DATA will serve the purpose.

The following link will provide good information on LSMW Idoc method:

[http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/ad/2d54a41d7011d2b42e006094b944c8/frameset.htm]

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Venkat