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Business Partner

Business Partner is the register of the companies a tenant trades with: the suppliers it buys from and the manufacturers whose goods it sells. Each company is one record, with a name, a GS1 location number, addresses and one or more roles. Your ERP keeps the register up to date, and Hii Retail publishes every change as an event.

One supplier, one record. The ERP's supplier card for Fjord Garden, id V-20417, is sent once to Business Partner. The same id V-20417 already appears on a delivery note in Goods Received and on stock movements in Stock Transaction Processing, and now there is one place that says who V-20417 is: Fjord Garden AB, supplier with a lead time of 168 hours, manufacturer, return address in Borås.

Why it exists​

Hii Retail has long carried a businessPartnerId on deliveries, stock movements, stock counts and stock corrections. Until this service, nothing said who that id was. Business Partner records who it is: its name and legal name, its GS1 Global Location Number (GLN), where to send goods back to, and how long it takes to deliver.

🛑 The partner id is your ERP's own id, and it is the same businessPartnerId the other services already carry. Register Fjord Garden as V-20417 here only if your ERP also sends V-20417 on its deliveries, counts and corrections. A partner registered under a different id from the one on your documents is a second, unconnected record.

What it holds​

Held perPage
Business partners: name, legal name, VAT number, GLN, status, addresses, your own extra propertiestenantThe business partner
Roles on each partner: SUPPLIER, MANUFACTURER, each with an active flagpartnerThe business partner
Supplier terms: the default lead time and a reliability scorethe partner's SUPPLIER rolePartners and your own warehouses
Warehouse supply terms: the default lead time of one of your own warehousesbusiness unit of type WAREHOUSEPartners and your own warehouses

A partner is registered once for the whole tenant and applies in every country and every store. It is never assigned to a store or a store group.

Where Business Partner sits. Your ERP sends partners and warehouse supply terms through the REST API, which answers 202 at once. Business Partner checks each request, stores it, and publishes one event per change: business-partner-changed and warehouse-supply-terms-changed. Your systems receive them through External Events, or read the current state back with GET. For warehouse supply terms the API first asks Business Unit Management whether the business unit is a warehouse.

Who keeps the register up to date​

Your ERP, or whichever system holds your supplier master data. It sends each partner with a PUT whenever the partner is created or changed, and a DELETE when it is removed. There is no importer, no file upload and no screen in Hii Retail for editing partners; the register holds what your system sends.

There is no Business Partner screen in the Inventory app either. Store staff see a supplier's name where the delivery itself carries it, in Goods Received.

ActionEndpoint
Create or replace a partnerPUT /api/v1/business-partners/{businessPartnerId}
Delete a partnerDELETE /api/v1/business-partners/{businessPartnerId}
Read one partnerGET /api/v1/business-partners/{businessPartnerId}
List partners, by role, status or GLNGET /api/v1/business-partners
Set, read or delete a warehouse's supply termsPUT, GET, DELETE /api/v1/warehouse-supply-terms/{businessUnitId}

See The API for the requests and the responses.

🛑 Writes are asynchronous. A 202 Accepted means the request was valid and has been queued, not that the partner is stored. It can be read back, and its event is published, shortly afterwards. See Writes are asynchronous.

Where to start​

If you want to…Read
understand what a partner record holds and what its roles meanThe business partner
know where lead times live, for suppliers and for your own warehousesPartners and your own warehouses
send partners from your ERP, or read them backThe API
receive partner changes in your own systemEvents
  • Goods Received records who shipped a delivery, as a businessPartnerId or as the businessUnitId of one of your own business units. A GS1 despatch advice that identifies its shipper only by GLN is matched to a business unit first, then to a business partner with that GLN. See GS1 import.
  • Stock Transaction Processing keeps the partner id on stock items and stock movements, so a batch can be traced back to the supplier it came from.
  • Business Unit Management holds your own stores and warehouses. Your own warehouse is a business unit there, never a business partner here.