1720980 - Blocked/Obsolete Suppliers are Still Available in Service Agents but not in Purchase Orders

You have blocked/obsolete some Suppliers in the system. You have observed that these blocked Suppliers are still available in the Value Help while assigning to a Service Agent. But these Suppliers are not available in the Value Help of Purchase Orders.

SAP Business ByDesign

1. Go to Business Partner Data work center.
2. Select Service Agent view.
3. Create New Service agent.
4. In the value help for Supplier, the blocked Supplier is available.
5. Go to Purchase Orders work center.
6. Select Purchase Orders view.
7. Create New Purchase Order.
8. In the value help for Supplier, the blocked Supplier is not available.

We handle the Business Partner lifecycle status in different ways for transactional processes and the master data maintenance. In transactional processes obsolete and blocked business partners are not allowed (therefore they don't appear in a value help (i.e.
purchase order)).

In the master data maintenance. we don't consider the status (i.e. status of supplier in service agent screen). Reason for this is an user might want to maintain his master data first and change the lifecycle status of the supplier back to active afterwards.

The system is designed in a way that usage of Business Partner (Supplier) will not consider the status. Because It might be that you want to complete the data of a blocked/obsolete account before you unblock/active that again.

Here is the evaluation of status of Business Partner (Supplier):

In Preparation: It is not possible to use the Business Partner in any other business transaction documents.

Active: All business documents are allowed to create references with this status value. This status value is a prerequisite for the consistency of the reference.

Blocked: Business documents are only allowed to create new references with this status when they can save inconsistent data.

In contrast, if the Business documents which already have a reference to a meanwhile blocked Business Partner can finish their process / do not need to change their behavior.

Obsolete: It is not allowed to create references to Business Partner with this status because the intention of this status value is that the Business partner gets archived.

In the upcoming release, the status of the Business Partner will be displayed in the value help pop-up.

 2889470 - Blocked/Obsolete Supplier is used in Purchasing Documents

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