What method can be employed to reduce the maintenance effort for customer master data?

Utilizing business partner roles is a highly effective method to reduce the maintenance effort for customer master data within SAP S/4HANA. By adopting this approach, organizations can manage multiple aspects of customer relationships through a single entity—the business partner—while assigning specific roles that determine how the partner interacts with various business processes. This simplifies the structure of customer data management.

When business partners are effectively utilized, each role can cater to different functions, such as the customer role for sales, vendor role for procurement, or employee role for HR. This means that changes or updates to the partner's details can be managed from a centralized point, thereby minimizing redundant data entries and ensuring consistent data governance across different departments. As a result, this leads to significant efficiency gains in maintaining customer master data, reducing the overall workload associated with data management.

Other options, while potentially beneficial in their own right, do not provide the same level of centralization and efficiency in data management as utilizing business partner roles does. For instance, automated notifications may improve awareness of changes but do not necessarily reduce the effort involved in maintaining the actual customer data. Standardizing data formats can help improve data quality but does not directly streamline the maintenance process. Increasing the number of user roles could complicate rather than