Motivation

Business Partners are governed and maintained in the SAP MDG hub environment, however, there are a few roles like Credit Management which SAP does not fully support in MDG. Hence, it’s essentially maintained in the S/4 operational instance.

Problem

The OTC team updates the BP by adding Credit Management role UKM000 in the SAP S/4 environment. Let’s assume the same BP undergoes maintenance in MDG via a Change Request process where the Credit Management role does not exist. After the Change Request is activated, this BP gets replicated to S/4 via SOA DRF. Now when the BP is displayed through either BP transaction or Maintain Business Partner app in Fiori, the Credit Management role that was added by the OTC team is seen to have gotten deleted.

Solution

This problem can be overcome with the usage of DRF filters. After defining a replication model in S/4, we need to maintain filters for the BP roles for the inbound Business Partners coming in from the MDG system and add Credit Management role to the exclusion list.

Below are the configuration steps: –

Step 1: Execute DRFIMG in S/4 (target) system.

Step 2: Define Custom Settings for Data Replication > Define Technical Settings for Business Systems.

Step 3: Add an entry for the MDG business system and check Disable for Replication (for not sending the BP back to MDG).

Step 4: Define Replication Model.

Step 5: Add an entry for replication model from S/4 to MDG. And make sure it’s Active.

Step 6: Add Outbound Implementation for Business Partner – 986_3.

Step 7: Assign target system to the replication model i.e., the Business System defined in step # 3.

Step 8: Execute transaction DRFF in S/4 system and choose the replication model to add the filters.

Step 9: Click on the Create button to add filters to the Replication Model.

Note: BP role UKM000 is added to the filter criterion’s exclusion list so that the maintenance of Credit Management remains exclusive to S/4 system only.

Step 10: Click on the button – Show Segment Filters (9) and choose Business Partner Role – 98601 to add the filter criteria at the segment level as maintained at the object level.

Step 11: Maintain segment level filter criteria.

The idea is to configure Data Replication Framework in the S/4 environment same as we do in the MDG Hub with the exception of disabling replication to MDG by checking the flag mentioned in step # 3. Once the filters are maintained in the S/4 system, the replication of BP from MDG system will not cause the Credit Management role or the roles maintained in the exclusion list of the filter criteria to get deleted in the S/4 environment.

Below are the OSS notes/KBAs referred while figuring out a solution to this problem:
3000593 – Business Partner roles are deleted when replicating data from C4C to S/4HANA
2966571 – Partial (reduced) data model for business partner web service (SOAP)