Life Cycle
A life cycle stage enables you to record the different stages of a business partner as it progresses through its life cycle, with each stage representing a different view at a particular point in time. For example, a business partner might start off as a potential, move on to an intermediate stage as a prospect, before finally becoming a customer.
A life cycle stage is technically a business partner role. The assignment of stages to a life cycle is defined using the functionality provided by role exclusion groups. A life cycle therefore corresponds to a role exclusion group. These contain a range of roles that are mutually exclusive. -- 排他性--决定其唯一性
This means that only one business partner role in an exclusion group can be assigned to a business partner at any one time. This ensures that the assignment of roles from a role exclusion group to a business partner is unambiguous. Assigning a role which belongs to a role exclusion group is therefore the same as assigning a unique status.
To enable a sequence of statuses, you can define transitions between the roles contained in a role exclusion group, thus defining the order in which the life cycle stages occur. In this way you can prevent a business partner from omitting a stage or returning to a previous stage.
You define a life cycle, stages, and sequence in Customizing. You also have the following options:
Screen control: Using a Business Add-In (BAdI), you can use the life cycle stage as a criterion for hiding or displaying certain assignment blocks.
Field modification: Using a BadI, you can influence the fields in the account details based on the life cycle stage, for example, to display additional fields, or make fields mandatory or optional.
Initial life cycle stage: You can default the initial life cycle stage when accounts are created.
Search criterion: You can search for accounts by life cycle stage.
For more information, see in the Implementation Guide Customer Relationship Management Master Data Business Partner Define Basic Settings for Account Life Cycle
Note
The account life cycle is delivered as hidden function and has to be activated in the configuration tool.
