When organisations plan their move to SAP S/4HANA, they are usually focusing on things like infrastructure, cloud hosting, and new functionality.
By Tracy Gore, senior SAP consultant at BTEC Consulting
These are important, but many migration projects come to a grinding halt because of an area that often goes unnoticed: Customer-Vendor Integration (CVI).
In S/4HANA, SAP introduced the Business Partner model as the single, unified master data object. CVI synchronises and converts Customers and Vendors into Business Partners, and SAP S/4HANA migration cannot happen until the CVI is complete.
A prerequisite
CVI is perhaps the most common “gotcha” in SAP migrations. Even those few companies that are aware of the fact that something needs to get done tend to assume it’s optional or can be done later.
Data structure changes like CVI often feel like backend IT work rather than a strategic enabler, so it gets pushed down the priority list. The fact that the focus is on customer and vendor records doesn’t help, making CVI appear like a housekeeping exercise.
Some teams assume CVI will just happen as part of the technical conversion to S/4HANA, not realising that CVI is a separate and often lengthy project that needs business involvement, governance, and cleanup.
Without CVI completion, the migration cannot begin, it’s the bridge between old ECC master data and the S/4HANA world. Unfortunately, by the time most companies realise this, their migration project has already been delayed.
It’s at this point that many organisations also realise how fragmented, inconsistent, or duplicated their customer and vendor data is. CVI forces these issues into the open, but by then, it’s often too late.
Building the foundation
The same way no-one would build a house without starting with a foundation, you can’t start a SAP migration without CVI in place. However, CVI is more than a simple data exercise. It requires co-ordination across finance, procurement, and sales teams, not to mention technical preparation.
This is why we recommend an audit of existing Customer and Vendor records in ECC alongside the design of the CVI strategy. This will help assess data quality issues and decide how various groups, roles, and categories will be structured. Aligning with business processes will then be much easier, after which the technical elements can come into play.
While many companies try to do this themselves, most find that they don’t have the time or skills to ensure that there is no need to redo elements, leading to downtime and budget overruns. Using a partner allows the business to access the cross-functional expertise they need to align IT and business teams, so the migration actually works in practice.
From chaos to control
CVI projects are notorious for unexpected challenges such as duplicate records, incomplete data & inconsistent processes. A seasoned partner has seen these issues before and knows how to resolve them quickly without derailing timelines.
CVI forces companies to confront messy customer and vendor data. Partners offer data cleansing and governance best practices, ensuring the migration doesn’t just move bad data into a new system.
On their own, internal teams often underestimate the time and effort needed for CVI. A partner brings proven methodologies, accelerators, and tools that cut down the workload and speed up readiness for the actual S/4HANA migration. Since CVI requires collaboration between finance, sales, procurement, and IT, partners can act as facilitators to get stakeholders aligned and moving forward.
Done right, CVI is more than a prerequisite. It’s the foundation for better customer, supplier, and partner insights in the new SAP landscape. A partner ensures CVI doesn’t just tick a box, but sets up long-term business value.
A partner transforms CVI from a painful bottleneck into a strategic enabler, helping to ensure the migration goes smoothly, avoids nasty surprises, and delivers the promised business benefits of S/4HANA.