Navigating CVI: The Key to Successful SAP ECC to S/4HANA Conversion

Business Context / Motivation:

There are redundant object models in the traditional ERP system. Vendor master and Customer master date have several limitations. (In many cases, a business partner could be both a vendor and a customer, leading to redundancy because similar information must be maintained in both records.)

The limitations of the Customer/Vendor Object Model:

? Only one single address

? No relation between a Vendor and a Customer for the same real-world entity (no role concept)

? No persons (B2C)

? No time-dependency

With the introduction of SAP S/4HANA, these redundancies have been significantly reduced.

SAP introduced the Business Partner Model (BP), which unifies vendor and customer data into a single object, reducing the need to maintain separate master data records

Business Partner is capable of centrally managing master data for Business Partners, Customers, and Vendors. With current development, BP is the single point of entry to create, edit and display master data for Business Partners, Customers, and Vendors.

If you’re planning to move your ERP system to S/4HANA using a system conversion approach (CVI -> Business Partner Approach, part of Brownfield scenario), you will have to make sure that the BP data model is established in your ERP system prior to system conversion.

BP (business partner) concept existed in ERP and it used customer and vendor master data for sales and purchasing.

When you move to S/4HANA, BP becomes the leading object and customer and vendor are created under BP as roles.

BP can hold multiple roles such as customer, vendor, or even contact person, employee, and so on.

General data that is stored within the business partner is shared across all different roles, and it is possible to maintain multiple addresses for a given business partner. Also possible to maintain time- dependent addresses, bank data, and relationships.

In SAP S/4HANA, Business Partner (BP) is the leading object and single-entry point to maintain Customer and Supplier (formerly known as Vendor) master data.

It is thereby also a mandatory step for an ERP customer upgrading to S/4HANA, to synchronize their Customer and Vendor Masterdata to Business Partners in all clients in the respective system (this is also true for the Business Partners that are already in use).

To achieve this synchronization, Customer Vendor Integration (CVI) customizing settings must be active in the system, besides satisfying BP masterdata checks in the existing Customer and Vendor records. (Depending on your release level, you may have to apply some SAP Notes to make this tool available in your system. The standard availability of the CVI Cockpit comes with SAP ECC EHP8 SP13 — SAP_APPL 618 release, however it would also be made available in the lower releases (until SAP_APPL 600), as well)

Customers will need to execute multiple standalone reports/transactions, implementing several OSS Notes, spread across multiple application components. This process was perceived as complex and resulted in high efforts invested by customers/consultants as part of BP/CVI conversion projects.

HOW TO START

To address the above for ERP/ECC Customers, SAP has delivered a standard centralized guided Cockpit, that would have seamless integration to all the required process components, in the intended sequence.

This would enable customer/consultant community to perform CVI Synchronization in a hassle-free manner, assisted by a cognitive Cockpit, and get a holistic view of end-to-end conversion process. CVI Cockpit can be launched via t-code: CVI_COCKPIT IF you are missing CVI_COCKPIT t-code on your ECC system, than you will need to implement a TCI (or all the relevant notes from it) into your system. To ease the implementation of a big number of CVI related SAP Notes, SAP has collected CVI relevant corrections into a Transport-Based Correction Instruction note (TCI-note):

2951811 — Transport-based correction instructions (TCIs) for customer vendor integration (CVI) on ECC (SAP_APPL)

Be aware, that the TCI note gives a good coverage of about 600 to over 1000 SAP Notes (depending on your ERP Support Pack level), but doesn′t guarantee 100% SAP Note coverage for CVI. New SAP Notes in the CVI functional area can be released at any time without being immediately embedded in the CVI TCI SAP Note.

After you will execute t-code CVI_COCKPIT you will see 4 main tabs/stages:

Read Me: This is the first Stage of CVI Cockpit. Users can get information about various pre-requisite OSS notes and help documentations, related to CVI migration processes.

? Note Checker (link to SAP Note 2823648 — Information on Pre-requisite SAP Notes for Business Partner CVI Synchronization, please also check section 7.3.1 TCI Note for CVITCI Note for CVI

? CVI Library (SAP Note with important information links: 2823632 — Consulting Note for Business PartnerApproach and CVI Process).

Preparation: This is the second Stage of CVI Cockpit. The Tasks in this stage performs necessary business checks (functional and customizing) in the Customer and Vendor Masterdata required for CVI synchronization process to Business Partner data model. This stage also gives a provision to customize the checks which user may intend to suppress in a test or sandbox system.

CVI Load: This is the third stage of CVI Cockpit. It has a total of 8 tasks divided into three sections — Pre-Load Activities, Real Load Activities, and Post Load Activities. These tasks perform the main synchronization activities that creates BP Masterdata in system, for all the customer and vendor records.

Upgrade Preparation: This is the fourth and currently the last Stage of CVI Cockpit. The tasks in this stage mainly enables post-processing of records in the BP synchronization cockpit (to handle customer/vendor records that may have been parallelly created, as typically seen during course of a conversion project) This stage also helps to check the consistency of the BPs created. In context of Business Partner — CVI Synchronization, after successful completion of this step, typically user can proceed for system upgrade to S/4HANA.

SAP recommends completion of CVI implementation and synchronization well in advance of any SAP S/4HANA system conversion project.

High level example:

Scenario: If you’re going to create a business partner with, for example, a customer role, the data that you provide is processed by the CVI interface and all the data that are relevant to the business partner, which is the general data, will be stored in the business partner tables.

The data that are relevant to the customer or vendor are processed by the CVI interface and stored in the appropriate customer and vendor tables. After that, a link is created between the customer and business partner and also between the vendor and business partner.

• On the right-hand side the gold and blue boxes show the difference between the synchronization in ERP and S/4HANA.

The CVI synchronization, CVI implementation will have to be done in the ERP system so that the CVI process is not part of the system conversion downtime.

And also, you want to make sure that this is not in the critical path of the system conversion.

Obviously, we don’t want to have any last- minute surprises, and that is the reason why CVI implementation and synchronization should be completed before system conversion.

The CVI needs to be run in multiple cycles:

The first cycle should be run in a sandbox with a copy of production. Make a copy of the production into your sandbox, run the CVI and in that process, you will be able to analyze the data errors.

You will come up with some correction approaches for the errors that you have come across in the system. Once you identify those errors and the correction approaches, you need to correct all the errors in your entire landscape.

Once you complete all of that, when you run the CVI synchronization in each environment, you will not have errors and your process will go smoothly.

Then you start the CVI implementation in your dev box, and then move it to QAS, and then to production.

So in SAP ERP, you perform the CVI implementation, convert the data (which means that you will have a BP for every customer, vendor, and the associated contact person) and then you continue to operate your ERP system.

In other words, you can continue to use your customer and vendor transactions such as XK01, XK02, XD01, XD02, and so on.

Please note that the use of BP transaction is not recommended in the ERP system because it is not fully developed in ERP. Another important thing is that as long as you are in ERP, there are some possibilities that some BP creation may get into some error status and those errors are captured in post-processing office. The errors can be viewed by running the transaction MDS_PPO2.

You can access that and analyze the errors and correct those errors as well.

Now you are ready to convert your system!

T-code: CVI_COCKPIT

All the Tasks of the CVI Cockpit requires manual maintenance of statuses. There are three statuses — Red, Green and Yellow. Upon the first launch of the CVI Cockpit, all the statuses are defaulted (greyed out).

Based on the status of the Tasks, the status of the corresponding Stage is automatically determined.

Stage status is Red, if one or more of its Tasks are set to red

Stage status is Green, only if all its Tasks are set to green

Stage status is Yellow, if one or more of its Tasks are set to yellow

Unlike the Tasks and Stages, the Overall CVI Cockpit can have only two valid statuses- Red and Green, indicating Ready and Not Ready respectively.

The overall CVI Cockpit status becomes Green (Ready), only upon meeting the BOTH the below conditions:

All the Stages are Green (confirmed)

There should be no un-synchronized customer or vendor records (to BP) in the system

At all other times, when neither or none of the above conditions are met, the overall CVI Cockpit Status stays Red.

Next Steps — This button will provide information on the activities after Customer/ Vendor to BP synchronization. It is only enabled when the overall CVI Cockpit status is Green and remains disabled, otherwise. At any given point of time, click of the display detail button (as shown above) will give the real-time total count of un-synchronized customer and vendor records.

Across the CVI Cockpit stages, there are 2 types of Tasks — Executable and Non-executable. The non-executable Tasks are active both in Display and Edit Mode.

User is expected to perform the following actions to operate through the cockpit stages.

Click on Edit to activate the Tasks.

Click on Execute button to launch individual Tasks.

Click on the Information button to know more about respective Tasks.

Click on the Status Lights to maintain the status of the task.

During execution of a Task, user is mandatorily required maintain a Task Status by selecting one of the below Status, along with comments.

User also needs to enter a mandatory comment in the Comment field. Last Executed By field indicates the last person who handled the Task.

Precaution: One can achieve Stage status as Green, even with task statuses 04 — ‘Skip Step (Project Decision)’ and 06 — ‘OK with Reservation’. In such cases, user is expected to ensure completion of the concerned task before proceeding to next stage, in order to attain system consistency.

Click on the Change Log button to get the change history of all the Tasks in the current stage.

Save Options

In the middle of a task, if user exits the CVI Cockpit program, then the task will not get automatically saved. User is required to press SAVE to persist the data. Also, multiple concurrent users executing the Cockpit simultaneously is not supported presently.

Master Data Consistency

Let’s focus on Master Data Consistency which we can find in CVI_COCKPIT under Preparation tab (or execute transaction CVI_PRECHK (report CVI_MIGRATION_PRECHK))

The below screenshot shows the initial page of the report.

This report provides an overview of customer and vendor master data consistency that is required for conversion to Business Partner, along with the capabilities to make updates and corrections to both customer and vendor master data.

On the initial screen, you can select either customer or vendor and execute the report to check the data consistency of all the customers or vendors in the system. It is possible to narrow down the selection by entering a range of numbers and/or account groups and execute the report for a small set of customers or vendors.

By default, all business checks (Tax Code, Postal Code, Email, Transportation Zones, Tax Jurisdiction, Number Range, Industry, Bank Data, Address) are selected as shown in the screenshot above. You can select business checks as needed.

Once the appropriate selection criteria are set, you can execute the report. On executing the report, you will see the output listed under Run History as shown below.

Clicking on the Run ID will display the details of the inconsistencies as shown below.

It is possible to choose Edit as shown below and select, for example, Transportation Zone. In this example, the error is that the Transportation zone 0000000003 is not defined for country CH. In your system, you may see errors for any of the listed business checks as shown in the initial screen.

Once you select Transportation Zone, it shows only inconsistencies relevant to Transportation Zone as below. From this screen, you can enter the new values and click on the check button to validate the entry.

It is possible to use the Mass Populate button if you want to provide the same value (New Value) for all the errors. Click on the Mass Populate button to see the following pop up screen. Enter the new value and click on the green check button.

Now all the records in the results list for transportation zone will get filled with the new value that we passed in the mass populate pop up screen as shown below. Then, if you click on the Check button, you will see the message, “Input value will correct the error”. If everything is good, you can click on the Save button which updates the data in the database and clears the errors.

If you rerun the same report, you should not see the errors that you have just fixed. You will see only the remaining errors.

In our example, only the Tax Code error is now listed as shown in the screenshot below. As you can see in the message column, this error cannot be edited and corrected from this screen.

You need to analyze and resolve the issue and rerun the report to make sure that the error is cleared.

To see detailed information in relation to other CVI stages, please consult:

SAP S/4HANA Cookbook