Possibility of business partner change in ODM documents

[Former Member]

Hi Everybody,

due to an organizational change we are planning to combine two customer business partners into one.

Example:

Customer business partner A is assigned to location A

Customer business partner B is assigned to location B

Both business partners have a transportation lane with the same supplier.

Customer users are assigned either to business partner A or B.

We would like to achieve:

Customer business partner B is assigned to location A+B

Customer business partner A is not used anymore.

Customer users of business partner A are assigned to business partner B.

I know that the business partner can be easily changed within the location master data and the users can also be easily assigned to the business partner B. However we have already a lot of documents in the system for customer business partner A and with the change the user would not be able to look into the documents of customer A anymore. This means the customer users would lose the history of those documents (especialy the PO confirmations and ASNs).

So, does anybody know if it is possible to change the customer business partner within ODM documents (especially PO + ASN)? This would enable us to "move" the documents from customer business partner A to B and all history would be visisble for customer business partner B.

Best regards,

Maren

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Maren,

In your case maybe you can use Partner Dependent Master Data to create this A to B relationship.

Of course this needs to be tested well in your QA system.

Here is the link for this maintanence from SNC Help.

Partner-Dependent Master Data - Master Data - SAP Library

Your sample can be seen as below.

Regards,

Selim Batur

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Selim,

thank you for your answer and the interesting idea.

I have tested the partner-dependent master data in our QA system. However it does not change the partner in the ODM documents but only offers an additional field in the selections/screens with a different name of the customer.

As it has no impact on the business partner in the documents technically / authorization-wise still two business partners are needed. So, this is not helping us to solve the issue.

Best regards,

Maren

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Maren,

As a last option, you can think about developing a custom program to update existing documents PARTNER ID in the tables.

You should list out all the active ODM tables in the system and then convert partnerid to update with the new one's partner id.

According to that you can have the visibility of the old documents with the new BP.

I know that it is not the best way at least a solution which you can think about.

Kindly share your chooice after you implemented.

Regards,

Selim Batur

[Former Member]

Hi Maren,

I would suggest you to create new BP  as "C"

a) Assign BP=C to all the locations which were using BP A &B under T Code: /n/SAPAPO/LOC3

b) All the Users who were assigned to BP A&B to be assigned to BP C under T Code BP

c) You can mark for deletion for Old BP to avoid any further confusions.

Hope this will help!!

Regards,

Guru

[Former Member]

Hi Guru,

thanks for your answer.

We checked this option already. However with a new BP C we are loosing the history for BP A and B which is an even bigger disadvantage for us. This is why we decided to combine BP A&B into BP B and why I am looking for an option to change the BP in all orders from BP A. This would help us to keep the history.

Best regards,

Maren