SAP Trading Partner Management (TPM) can best be described as a component within SAP Integration Suite. It provides the functionality to manage business-to-business (B2B) communication with external trading partners. TPM acts as an interface that helps configure, run and monitor the message exchanges between partners based on predefined agreements.

In other words, TPM helps you manage B2B relationships with multiple trading partners.

Technically, TPM is a capability, which you need to provision within your SAP Integration Suite, just like e.g. Cloud Integration or Integration Advisor.

To efficiently run our multi-partner integration scenarios, we will need the following components:

• Cloud Integration - integration component mediating communication between source and target system

• Integration Advisor - contains library of EDI definitions and message mapping (MIG/MAG)

• Trading Partner Management

These will be our building blocks, as what we want to achieve is the following - we want to SEND DATA to a PARTNER.

• SEND part will be handled by Cloud Integration.

• DATA part will be handled by Integration Advisor.

• PARTNER part will be handled by TPM.

Let's start with DATA

We have a source format of a message, which we want to send to our partner (let's work with outbound flow for now, inbound is just the same reversed). This format can be Idoc or X12, just to name the common ones.

Then we have a target format of a message, which the partner expects. These specifications are called Message Implementation Guidelines - MIG. Now we have a MIG for source message and a MIG for target message.

And finally, there is a mapping, which translates the source format into the target format. This is called Mapping Guidelines - MAG.

Technically, the result of the above will be a set of files - data definitions in XML and mapping in XSLT code. Without TPM we would need to manually upload them into our integration flows, but with TPM we don't even need to know about them.

Define our PARTNER

TPM is the environment, where we set up our Trading partner and create a sort of Agreement, which will serve as a base for our mutual communication.

Here we define the partner's address, system type, security, communication protocols, and also integration adapter settings. That's right, TPM is the place to set up URL, certificates and all these detailed technical settings, which will be later picked up by integration flows in runtime.

SEND message

To transport a message from our system to partner's system, we use the Cloud Integration. Even though we will most likely build our own iflows for the purpose of mapping tests or connectivity tests, in fact we can solely live with SAP pre-built integration iflows, which we download from API Business Hub. These iflows are configured with parameters, which in runtime are populated from TPM.

How it works together

As a simple overview of how TPM works, we can borrow a screen from the TPM configuration.

It illustrates the message flow in the above described context. From left to right, the message is picked up by a Sender adapter and continues to Communication channel, which applies our Sender adapter configuration from TPM.

The Interchange step is massage-oriented and defines the source data format (IDoc, X12) and the source MIG.

In the Mapping step we assign the relevant MAG, data mapping is performed and flows further to Interchange step, which defines the target data format and target MIG.

Receiver Communication channel applies the technical Receiver adapter configuration and sends data to Receiver system.

Partner Directory

The database which holds all the configuration done in TPM is called Partner Directory and it is the actual TPM configuration repository. We can imagine the whole TPM framework as a GUI above Partner Directory. We don't modify Partner Directory directly.

So this is the basic overview of what TPM is and how it is positioned within other SAP Integration Suite components. Next time we will take a closer look at the DATA part - MIG, MAG and how it fits within Trading Partner Management.

A whole series of blogs on Trading Partner Management:

1. Overview

2. Data

3. Partner

4. AS2

5. ….will continue

It was also published here:

https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-members/sap-trading-partner-management-part-i/ba-p/13876443