SAP SD Partner Determination in Sales and Distribution

Implementation Options

As part of its business activities, a company has a great deal of contact with natural and legal persons, that work with each other and have different functions.

A customer orders goods from a company. A forwarding agent might deliver goods to the customer, to ensure that they arrive in good condition. An employee within the company processes the business transactions.

The component Partner Determination in Sales and Distribution allows you to display the partners involved in the business transaction, their functions and their business relationships in the R/3 system. When creating or processing sale documents, the system can determine the partners automatically.

Integration

Using Other Components in Logistics

In partner determination the system takes data from the business partner master records. In the component hierarchy the Customer and Vendor business partner data is assigned to Logistics - General (LO) - Logistics Basic Data: Business Partners - Customer or Vendor.

With Financial Accounting (FI)

As accounting data is always needed for processing a business transaction, sales and distribution data is created for a business partner in a common master record.

From an accounting view there are customers Customers and vendors Creditors. Therefore customer master data is managed in a customer master record and vendor master data is managed in a creditor master record.

With Human Resources (HR)

The master records for the partner type Personnel (e.g. sales personnel) are maintained in the personnel master record in the application component Human Resources (HR) - Personnel Management (PA). If HR is not used in your company you can create a personnel master record yourself for employees in sales and distribution. You can find further information in the implementation guide (IMG) for Sales and Distribution under Master Data ® Business Partners ® Use sales employee without HR

Features

The function, which a partner (natural or legal person) fulfills in a business process, is shown in the R/3 system as a partner function.

The component offers various partner functions, which are significant for sales and distribution processing. In addition there are special partner functions for sales support available. If required, you can define new partner functions in Customizing.

You can assign a group of partner functions in Customizing to each transaction (e.g. billing document) using partner procedures.

You can maintain partner relationships in the customer master and in the sales and distribution documents. As a rule there are already partner relationships in the customer master record. When creating a sales document these are automatically created in the document header.

You can change the proposed partner functions in the sales document if this is permitted in Customizing.

In the sales documents, you can define partners at item level as well as header level, if this is permitted in Customizing.