Organizations often discover that their SAP landscapes are spread across multiple CRM IDs just when they want to activate cross-solution scenarios like People Intelligence on SAP Business Data Cloud. This article walks through how Business Consent helps you overcome those CRM boundaries and quickly connect SAP BDC with say SAP SuccessFactors (any of our Public Cloud or RISE portfolio), without waiting for lengthy consolidation projects.

I would like to share some of the key learnings from SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) deep-dive design discussions and implementation experiences that may benefit customers and partners in the future.

Let us assume you are a customer using SAP SuccessFactors and are interested in exploring People Intelligence. You sign the order form for SAP BDC, and this order form grants you the necessary cloud services such as SAP BDC Core and includes a line item for People Intelligence, listing the number of users and the corresponding BDC Capacity Units to which you are entitled.

All these entitlements are grouped under a CRM ID, for example 100001. Since you already have SAP SuccessFactors, let us say it is under CRM ID 100002.

Once your SAP BDC tenant is provisioned, you proceed to add the relevant BDC components and the SuccessFactors system as part of the system formation (refer to these SAP BDC Provisioning blog series  by Shreya, where she provides an excellent explanation of the steps; Step 21 covers system formation). This is one of the mandatory steps required to deploy and use People Intelligence applications and their corresponding data products. When you deploy an app, system formation acts as the enabler for harmonizing data from the source system using SAP-managed pipelines, which in turn deploy data products and intelligent apps into BDC. For system formation, one of the expectations is that all landscapes, including the provisioned BDC tenant, fall under the same CRM ID. If this is not the case, you can still provision BDC and perform system formation for the BDC components, but since SuccessFactors is on 1000002, you will not be able to add it to the system formation.

When we review the order form and validate the CRM IDs, it is often the case that systems are distributed across multiple CRM IDs. While it is technically possible to consolidate all systems into a single CRM ID, this process may take several weeks or even months. This is precisely where the concept of Business Consent becomes valuable and helps you avoid that additional effort. Let me explain this with a scenario.

Based on the earlier example, from SAP4ME I have already added the BDC components as part of system formation, and these reside under CRM ID 100001.

Next, I attempt to include new systems in the system formation and search for the SuccessFactors system, but I am unable to find it because it is under a different CRM ID.

To have this system included in the system formation, I navigate to the “Consent Requests” section under the Customer Landscape tab in SAP4ME and then select “Request Consent”.

You can either provide only the SuccessFactors system URL or specify the System ID and namespace, and then click “Request”.

If you need to determine the System ID and namespace, here is an example of how I obtain them from the Systems Landscape under BTP for SuccessFactors. Namespaces will always follow the pattern sap.; in this case, it is sf. You then choose the scope as “System Sharing”.

Once you click “Request”, the consent request is sent to the BTP admin of the SuccessFactors landscape.

They can review the incoming consent request from their BTP Cockpit under the Consent Request section of the system landscape. Under the “Incoming Consent Requests” tab, the admin can either approve or reject the consent request.

After the request is approved, the BDC admin can view the status in SAP4ME under the customer landscape, where it will appear with the status “Approved”.

At this point, the consent between BDC and the source system in a different CRM ID has been successfully established. When you now attempt to add the SuccessFactors system as part of the system formation, you will be able to find it, as the approved system from the consent request appears in the “Include Systems” list.

This approach eliminates the need to consolidate systems under a single CRM ID and still allows you to access systems that reside in different CRM IDs.

Business Consent offers a pragmatic path to realizing value from SAP Business Data Cloud even when your systems sit in different CRM IDs. By leveraging consent requests and system sharing, you can accelerate People Intelligence use cases, reduce landscape friction, and focus your energy on delivering insights rather than restructuring your commercial setup.