Managing mandatory address checks for CPD (and other One-Time Account) Customer or Vendor when moving to SAP S/4HANA

Imagine this scenario, you are in the middle of processing your customer or vendor records through the business partner CVI conversion in your SAP ERP system. All this is in preparation for your system conversion to SAP S/4HANA.

When running the CVI synchronization with the MDS load cockpit, the CVI checking process churns out error messages, each related to one-time customer or vendor records complaining about missing address data in these records. Why is this happening?

To find out why, and how you can now resolve this, please read on.

Background

The use of customer or vendor master records in SAP require a relatively high level of mandatory data field entry and maintenance for each master data record. When the number of customer or vendor master data records run into the tens of thousands, the effort and time to maintain the mandatory data fields for each record can be challenging.

Furthermore, for a customer or vendor that you might transact with only once or twice, having to maintain a large amount of data fields just for the one (or two) time use can become questionable.

Therefore, to enable transacting with such rarely used customers or vendors, SAP provides the option of using one-time customer or vendor account groups, which only require minimal data field entry.

There are 2 standard SAP CPD (Conto-pro-Diverse) one-time account groups:

• CPD – one-time account group with internal no assignment
• CPDA – one-time account group with external no assignment

SAP One-time Account Groups (in SAP ERP)

For customer or vendor records created with these one-time account groups, the bulk of data fields, including address related fields are not mandatory entry and can be left blank.

Problem Statement

However, in SAP S/4HANA, the Country and Language fields are by default mandatory for any business partner record, whether it be customer or supplier, even for records belonging to one-time account groups.

As a result, if you are performing Business Partner CVI processing of your existing customer or vendor records into business partner records in SAP ERP, existing one-time customers or vendors records to be processed will be flagged with error during the CVI process. This is because the CVI conversion process checks all customer or vendor records for the mandatory address data fields in preparation for the conversion to SAP S/4HANA.

This happens when MDS_LOAD_COCKPIT is being executed. The synchronization for such records will fail, resulting in a PPO error message: AM216 “Incomplete address; enter country”.

Which would mean you would have to maintain the missing address data fields first in order to resolve this error.

Solution

To circumvent this unwanted check for one-time vendor or customer records, SAP has introduced the option of suppressing this mandatory check during the CVI conversion process.

This is available as of SAP ERP EHP 8 Support Pack 15, and can also be implemented via the SAP note 2949716 – CPD Account Group Enhancements in Master Data Consistency Check Report.

Refer to this SAP note, and the documented pre-requisite SAP note required for the implementation of this new feature – 2955243 – CPD Account Group Enhancements: Domain and Activate Field Check Suppression.

When implemented, the following configuration steps for Master Data Synchronization can be set up to suppress the Address check for one-time account customer or vendor during the CVI processing.

The configuration navigation path is:

SPRO Customizing-> Cross-Application Components-> Master Data Synchronization-> Customer/Vendor Integration-> Activate Field Check Suppression:

Navigation path in Customizing

In the customizing step Activate Field Check Suppression, Add Entry and select “Address Checks for all C/V One-Time Accounts (CPD etc.)”:

List of available options for Field Suppression

Then activate the selection to suppress the field check:

Select and activate suppression check

This configuration setting then activates the bypass of the mandatory address field checking during CVI processing.

Correspondingly, in SAP S/4HANA, to bypass the address check for one-time account customer or supplier business partners,  you can implement the following SAP note to suppress the check for such business partners records in SAP S/4HANA:-

2917481 – Skip Address Checks for One Time Customer/Supplier in SAP S/4HANA. This feature is also standard as of SAP S/4HANA 2020.

With the implementation of this SAP note, you will have the option to make the customizing setting to skip address checks for vendor and customer one-time accounts. The following screens illustrate the presence of this indicator for a one-time customer account group:

As shown above, the Skip Address Check, though  present, is disabled from use. This is because the One-Time Account indicator is not selected. This is to ensure that the Skip Address check will only be possible for one time customer or vendor account groups.

Once the One-Time Account indicator is selected, the Skip Address Check indicator will also be selectable a shown above.

This behavior is similar for vendor one-time account group as shown above.

With this indicator set, you will then be able to bypass the mandatory default checks for Country Code and Language in SAP S/4HANA when creating customers or supplier business partners with the one-time account groups.

Note: This blog post is relevant for SAP S/4HANA on-premise and Private Cloud Edition deployments. I hope this blog post was helpful for you. If so, click on “like” or “share”. I’m looking forward to your feedback and thoughts or clarification questions you may have in the comment section below.

Brought to you by the SAP S/4HANA RIG and Customer Care team.

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