Doubt on the need of partitioning

Hello Team

                  I know that when the no of records in a table exceeds 2 billion then we need to go with partitioning . But we replicate tables from SAP ECC into our HANA system So we don't create tables . so at what step this partitioning needs to be done . At the time of replication or after that because what i saw is that partitioning is being done with create statements but since the tables are already coming from SAP ECC when we do this partitioning .

Regards