Guideline for Trading Partner Management (TPM)

What is SAP B2B Integration Cockpit (B2BIC)?

SAP B2B Integration Cockpit is a platform that enables you to monitor and access the B2B add-on platform from SAP Process Orchestration. It combines 3 parts which are EDI, Logs and Technical Settings. You can use B2BIC for, 

• Trading Partner Management (TPM) 
• Managing EDI Processes 
• NRO Maintenance 

• B2B Log Viewer 
• OFTP Log Viewer 
• PGP Secure Store 

What is SAP B2B Trading Partner Management (TPM)?

In this blog, I will touch on the TPM part.

SAP B2B Trading Partner Management (TPM) provides the needs of B2B commerce in an EDI environment. TPM helps you streamline and manage EDI business relationships with multiple trading partners, profiles, and agreements. TPM application easy to use user interface solves the complexity of B2B communication between partners.

TPM helps you to:

• Maintain partner information,
• Create agreements between partners,
• Define certificate rollover profiles,
• Configure functional profiles for custom value maps. 

Managing of Trading Partner Profile

You can get started with Trading Partner Profile by defining Partner Profiles. EDI with trade profiles helps you improve business communication. You create profiles of trading partners to store information such as partner name, partner type, industry, region, contracts, documents, etc.

After adding partner profile, you can also copy, edit and find the existing ones.

Managing of Trading Partner Agreement

You can use a trading partner agreement between two trading partners in order to regulate the exchange of EDI documents and define the communication scenario.

All agreements are kept in the TPM database. You can add, copy and edit these agreements easily.

Managing of Functional Profiles

You can create multiple profiles based on the trading partners' business requirements. By defining and managing profiles, you improve performance among trading partners.

The functional profile is a collection of TPM template that stores custom key values. You can access a functional profile during runtime by calling a contract or functional profile name using predefined UDFs in SAP Process Orchestration. You can add, copy, edit and find functional profiles on TPA.

Managing of TPM Templates

Templates store generic data which can be reusable with different profiles. Each template is made up of key-pair values. You can add a template to multiple functional profiles from the Trading Partner Management profiles management section and use them during the message mapping runtime.

Managing of TPM Code Lists

In order to use code lists, you should define runtime parameters with specific values. You can add, edit, copy and find code lists.

Managing of Certificate Rollover Profiles

This feature in TPM is used to store security certificates associated with the trading partner.

Before concluding, I want to mention that you can also use Import/Export TPM Data option to import/export TPM files into a Trading Partner Management database.