How to support global key account with S/4HANA Cloud customer hierarchy?

In SAP S/4HANA cloud, a sales type customer hierarchy is qualified for only one sales area (constructed by a sales organization, a distribution channel and a division). And only business partners belonging to the same sales area can be added to the hierarchy.

Questions

• How to handle global key accounts whose subsidiaries are not bound to a sales area?
• Is it possible to only maintain price condition once and automatically determine the specific price from global key account to its subsidiaries in different sales areas?

Solutions

SAP S/4HANA cloud customer hierarchy supports 3 types of subnotes(Help portal):

• Subnode: This is a text node that can be customized based on your business needs. It can contain multiple subnodes.
• Subnode – Business Partner: This is a business partner node, which can contain subnodes. The system auto-checks that the business partner added to the hierarchy belongs to the same sales area.
• Business Partner: This is a business partner node, however, it is a leaf node and cannot further contain any nodes. The system auto-checks that the business partner added to the hierarchy belongs to the same sales area.

As text note is not bounded to a single sales area and can be marked as pricing relevant, it can be used as global key account to reduce the efforts for pricing condition maintenance.

Here is an example on how to do it step by step:

1. Adapt system configuration – Create a condition table (e.g.886 )without sales area data fields.
   
2. Adapt system configuration – Assign this new condition table 886 to a price access sequence (“ZCHT Customer Hierarchy Testing”).
3. Adapt system configuration – Maintain pricing procedure

Copy your existing pricing procedure to a new one(e.g.“ZCHT01”) and add the access sequence (“ZCHT Customer Hierarchy Testing”) into the new pricing procedure(e.g.“ZCHT01”).

4. Adapt system configuration – Set Pricing Procedure Determination.

Update the pricing procedure determination of related sales areas to use the new pricing procedure (E.g. ZCHT01”)

Assign pricing procedure ZCHT01 to sales area (1010.10.00)

Assign pricing procedure ZCHT01 to sales area (1710.10.00)

5. Adapt system configuration – Assign Customer Hierarchy Relevance to Sales Document Types

Make sure the customer hierarchy determination has been enabled for related sales document Type.

For example, assign Basic Hierarchy Determination to OR Standard Order

6. Maintain master data – Create customer hierarchy.

Create two customer hierarchies using text note as global key account (e.g.” KEYACCOUNT”) using Manage Customer Hierarchies App. Make sure the hierarchies have been activated before usage.

Customer Hierarchy for Sales Area (1010,10,00)

Customer Hierarchy for Sales Area (1710,10,00)

7. Maintain master data – Create price condition record.

Create price condition records for the key account (E.g. 15% discount for KEYACCOUNT)

Now create sales orders for customers (E.g. customer 17100001, 10100005, 10100003) under customer hierarchy KEYACCOUNT, the 15% discount will apply.

And you could also check the details via Analysis Pricing.

Summary

In SAP S/4HANA cloud, customer hierarchy can only be defined within one sales area. But with text node, it is possible to reduce condition records maintenance effort for global key accounts.

• Maintain global key account as text node(E.g. KEYACCOUNT) in multiple customer hierarchies for different sales areas, and mark it as price relavent.
• Create new condition table without sales area
• Maintain condition records for global key account text node(E.g.KEYACCOUNT,15% discount)
• Configure access sequence and pricing procedure with this new condition table
• Make sure the pricing procedure has been been assigned to all related sales areas

Then all BPs from different customer hierarchies/sales area under the same text node (E.g.KEYACCOUNT) ) will inherit the same pricing condition from the text node.

Original Article:
https://blogs.sap.com/2023/06/05/how-to-support-global-key-account-with-s-4hana-cloud-customer-hierarchy/