← All features

B2B and TPM

Partner and communication management

Keeping subsidiaries, partners and communications consistent across development, test and production in SAP TPM is slow, manual work.

There are two parties in B2B. On your own side you need a company and subsidiaries for every business entity, often one per unique identifier and qualifier combination within a format. On the other side are trading partners and, for VAN providers, communication partners. Figaf B2B Management gives B2B teams overviews and fast track functions to manage all of them in SAP Integration Suite Trading Partner Management, across every system.

How it works

• Company and subsidiaries overview. A dedicated overview manages the parent company and all its subsidiaries, with functions to create a new subsidiary and manage communications. When you create a subsidiary, Figaf creates the initial identifiers for the most commonly used formats and schemes or qualifiers, which also enforces a naming convention for the identifier aliases.
• Partner profiles. The partner profile overview includes communication partners, the TPM role for VAN providers, so you can view and manage them in Figaf and use them in agreements. Figaf proposes a short name for partners and subsidiaries, which you can adjust.
• Communications in all systems at once. You provide the basic communication parameters for a system type, and Figaf creates the communications in all systems, development, test and production, for the partner or the company and subsidiary.
• Every endpoint in one view. The communications view shows endpoint details for SFTP, IDoc, AS2 and ProcessDirect across purposes and environments, so you can consolidate and verify what is configured.
• Lists and filters. You can export partners and scenarios to CSV or Excel, and filter by the partner’s country or region and by company or subsidiary.
• Clean up safely. You can delete several partner profiles or agreements in one action. Figaf only allows you to delete partners that are not assigned to any active agreements.
• AS2 without authentication. For AS2 connections whose policy relies on encryption and signatures only, Figaf supports ProtectedAPI Auth, with simpler creation of subsidiaries. This requires SAP API Management and a key value map for the subsidiary AS2 identifiers, which Figaf updates on all tenants.
• Transport of security artifacts. Security artifacts for the company and subsidiaries can be kept in one source tenant and transported through the landscape to production.

Business value

• Less manual work. Identifiers and communications are created for all systems in one step, instead of repeating the same setup on development, test and production.
• Consistency across environments. The same names, identifiers and communications exist in every system, which makes transports of agreements reliable.
• Fewer errors. Naming conventions for identifier aliases and short names are applied by the tool, not by memory.
• Overview for large landscapes. With hundreds of partners and agreements, exports, filters and the endpoint view answer questions that would otherwise mean opening objects one by one.
• Safer changes. Partners in active agreements cannot be deleted, and security artifacts move through the landscape instead of being maintained by hand in production.

Good to know

The company and subsidiaries overview, communication partners and communications across systems came in release 2510. Bulk deletion came in release 2602, ProtectedAPI Auth for AS2 in release 2608, and the communications endpoint view and security artifact transport in release 2609. Related features: guided partner onboarding and B2B validation rules.

Learn more

• Figaf B2B Management