The R/3 Plug-In maps customers in Ship-to, Sold-to, Bill-to and Payer Account groups in R/3 to CRM higher level Role CRM000. As a result of the mapping, an R/3 customer created in account 0002 (Ship-to) in ECC or R/3 will have Sold-to, Bill-to and Payer roles in addition to the Ship-to Party Role when downloaded to CRM system
Likewise, system uploads customers to have all partner function assignments (Sold-to, Ship-to, Bill-to and payer) when a CRM Bill-to Party or Ship-to Party or Payer is uploaded to back-end ECC or R/3 system.
This is because ECC or R/3 and CRM customer master data is based on two different data models.
As a result, there is no 1:1 mapping between ECC or R/3 Account groups and CRM BP Roles.
This would cause a Ship-to Party to appear as Sold-to Party when a BP search is done based on The BP Roles. This would in turn create transactions with the Ship-to Party customer as the Sold-to Party customer.
Basic Assumptions:
SAP CRM Release is less than CRM 5.0 and connected with a back-end ECC or R/3 system.
In SAP CRM release CRM 5.0 changes were made to the business partner role concept, including a change whereby when you create a BP in the roles sold-to party, goods recipient, payer and invoice recipient, the customer role is not updated. Rather there is an individual update for each of the roles mentioned.
Business Requirements:
Maintain 1:1 mapping between ECC or R/3 customer account groups and CRM BP Roles.

MAPPING R/3 ACCOUNT GROUPS AND CRM ROLES

Home: Introduction
Part 1: Background information
Part 2: Technical information
Part 3: Scenario: CRM being the lead system
Part 4: Scenario results
Part 5: Configuration prerequisites in ECC or R/3 and CRM systems
Part 6: Scenario: ECC or R/3 being the lead system
Part 7: Maintain excluded functions
Review: Conclusion and more resources