How to replicate a customer from ERP to a Person in CRM

Question

Hi,
I am doing an implementation of CRM 7.0 and have to integrate it with an existing ERP (ECC6) system. I've set up the replication of the Business Partners to replicate two of the Account Groups in ERP to CRM and it is working well. The only problem is that the customers in the ERP system are Organizations and Persons. When the replication takes place, all are created as Organizations (role sold-to Party).
Is there a way to replicate customer data from ERP and have the BP in CRM created with BP Category 1 (Person) in stead of 2 (Organization)?
The customers in the ERP system are not consumers.
Thanks
Jeanine

Answer 1

I logged an OSS for this problem and SAP replied with the following:
"What you've explained is a standard behavior of the system.
Since CRM and R/3 have different BP data models, all BPs from R/3 are
transferred to CRM be default as Organizations.
An only exception is BPs, which are assigned into account group, which
is mapped into classification "Consumer: persons".
Customers downloaded to CRM will always be interpreted as Business
Partners of the type organisation.
Customers in R/3 are Organisations and are subsequently replicated to
the CRM system of the BP Type - Organisation, therefore the standard
scenario is that customers downloaded from R/3 are replicated as
Business Partners of type Organisation.
If you don't want to use functionality of Consumers, it's also
possible to change the category with a modification by
appending the R/3 outbound processing or the CRM Inbound processing
this would change the organisations to persons, and is possible by
changing the category in the complex structure from 2 to 1 by copying
the organisational data to the personal data, the category change
works only before the creation of Business Partners in CRM, for
existing BPs that have been downloaded, it would be necessary to
delete these BPs using Note 415007 and start the download again after
modifying the User-Exits.
The data sent from R/3 are mapped into a complex structure of type
BUS_EI_MAIN. In CRM table CRMC_BUT_CALL_FU you can add an own
function module for event "CRM INBOUND" and a position less than
100000. Here you can you can change the field
C_BP_STRUCT-CENTRAL_DATA-COMMON-DATA-BP_CONTROL-CATEGORY from 2 to 1
depending on other data that is available in this structure.
Additionally you have to map the organisation specific data
C_BP_STRUCT-CENTRAL_DATA-COMMON-DATA-BP_ORGANIZATION into the
person specific data
C_BP_STRUCT-CENTRAL_DATA-COMMON-DATA-BP_PERSON and initialize the
organizational data. Be sure to check the category before doing this,
because the initial download sometimes forces partial processing
in case of errors and tries to reprocess the BPs that don't have errors
So your mapping from organizational data to personal data should be
done only once.
This solution only works if the criteria is available in the structure
BUS_EI_EXTERN. If it is not, you can add an User Exit in R/3 in the
R/3 outbound processing at event DE_BCS2S in the tables TBE24
(definition of product) and TBE34 (definition of your module).
Unfortunately the data are only available as BAPIMTCS structures
and you have to look for a structure
with BAPIMTCS-TABNAME = 'BSC_MAINCE' to change the category.
See module PI_BP_MAIN_TO_BAPIMTCS in order to understand this mapping."
We will do the cutomization and test, but I think this is the only solution.
Regards
Jeanine