Beginning of October this year we released SAP S/4HANA 2020.
In the following blog, I will summarize the highlights that come with Product Compliance.
The blog is built as a series of 3 parts and present the key highlights for:
Product compliance is important for various industries. Companies must adhere to regulations and global industry and company standards to be able to produce or sell a product in a country/region or transport it through various countries.
A product steward and regional experts must assess the compliance of products, often starting in the development phase of a product. They have to decide if a product can be sold or produced in or shipped through countries/regions for specific applications. They also specify if a safety data sheet is needed in certain countries or regions and in which languages the safety data sheet has to be provided.
Dangerous good experts classify products according to the applicable dangerous goods regulations. They also specify which regulations are applicable for certain counties and specific modes of transports and how dangerous goods data is processed checks in sales and delivery documents.
In many countries, regulations state that, above a certain quantity of chemicals and other hazardous substances, you must register with the authorities the maximum quantities of these substances that you plan to purchase, import, produce, sell, or export within a certain period.
With the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release, substance volume tracking helps you you can get an overview of the aggregated volumes of substances that are imported or produced by a specific legal entity of your company.
Substance volume tracking is integrated with the logistic processes for purchasing and manufacturing. It tracks, calculates, aggregates, and monitors the imported and produced substance volumes that result from these processes. By comparing the recorded quantities with the limit values, the system can warn you in good time before a limit value is exceeded, and if a limit value is exceeded, the system can also block the respective business process. This means you can ensure that you stay below the quantity limits.
Key Features for this release are:
Contract Management is becoming more and more tangled with the Sales process. For Sales, contract management is used to automate and enable faster, more accurate production and delivery of legal-approved contracts to a company’s prospects or customers. This way, sales can focus on customer relationship management, communications, and revenue production.
The integration of compliance information into sales and delivery means the following: Only those materials that are marked in the material master as valid for compliance checks are considered.
For compliance-relevant materials, compliance checks run in sales and delivery documents. Depending on the kind of documents, the system issues warnings or blocks items or entire documents.
Sales representatives can request a compliance status for a material when they want to sell it in a country/region where no current compliance assessment for the material exists.
With this 2020 release, we have established a way to view the status of compliance checks of product marketability, dangerous goods, and safety data sheets in sales contracts and sales quotation management, in addition to other enhancements to the sales and delivery processes. This prevents executions of non-compliant sales orders for all relevant products and therefore assures compliant transport regarding dangerous goods regulations.
In other words, SAP S/4HANA now allows you to create a sales contract that contains compliance-relevant materials and the system carries out compliance checks that verify the following:
The results of these compliance checks are displayed as statuses in the sales contract.
Process
If a product has been marked as relevant for compliance in the product master, the system checks marketability data in real-time as an internal sales representative is creating or editing a sales document and determines item and header status as described below.
Determination of the Item Status
With this feature, you can do the following in the Process Product Compliance Events and Process Product Compliance Tasks apps:
Process Product Compliance Events
With this SAP Fiori app, you can display an overview of user actions that affect compliance objects. The system captures and processes this data to ensure that all compliance data is kept current. Depending on the event, the system determines the affected objects and carries out follow-on actions. For each object that needs to be processed, a separate task is triggered. For example, if a user adds a compliance requirement to an active compliance purpose, the system creates the relevant compliance assessments, propagates the assessments to subordinate products and raw materials according to the compliance pattern, carries out a compliance check of the affected products and raw materials, and releases the new assessments automatically where possible.
Process Product Compliance Tasks
With this SAP Fiori app, you can view all tasks that have been triggered as parts of product compliance events. A separate task is needed for each affected object for each event. You can reprocess failed tasks as well as check which tasks are new, in progress or completed. To troubleshoot an individual task, you can navigate to the object page of the task to view the task log and related events. If the task has failed, you can check the log, solve the root cause of the processing failure, and process the task again.
With this feature in the Unpackaged Product - Material-Based Composition app, you can view and edit the composition of materials for an unpackaged product, including all materials put into production. You can adapt the composition as needed. The released composition is used to evaluate if the product meets compliance requirements based on raw material and supplier data.
Note: The Unpackaged Product - Composition of Materials app is replaced by the new Unpackaged Product - Material-Based Composition app with enhanced functions for managing compositions.
With the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release, you can now:
Whit this innovation for the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release you can visualize and filter existing marketability assessments for products in the new SAP Fiori app Analyse Marketability Assessments - For Products.
You can use this app to:
Note: This app is built using Analytical List Page technology. For more information about the Analytical List Page technology, see Analytical List Page.
The basis and foundation for the marketability is the management of compliance requirements. With the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release, we have enlarged the regulatory content. The update provides
You can find these compliance requirements in the Activate Compliance Requirements app for each solution area. In this SAP Fiori app, we include also a new feature and now you can compare a new or updated compliance requirement version with an existing version.
If you are also interested in Product Compliance for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, I would like to draw your attention to my blog SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Product Compliance – The Link Collection
For more information on SAP S/4HANA 2020, check out the following links:
Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via @VoglerChrist and LinkedIn
In the following blog, I will summarize the highlights that come with Product Compliance.
The blog is built as a series of 3 parts and present the key highlights for:
- Part 1: Product Marketability and Chemical Compliance
- Part 2: Dangerous Goods Management
- Part 3: Safety Data Sheet Management.
Introduction
Product compliance is important for various industries. Companies must adhere to regulations and global industry and company standards to be able to produce or sell a product in a country/region or transport it through various countries.
A product steward and regional experts must assess the compliance of products, often starting in the development phase of a product. They have to decide if a product can be sold or produced in or shipped through countries/regions for specific applications. They also specify if a safety data sheet is needed in certain countries or regions and in which languages the safety data sheet has to be provided.
Dangerous good experts classify products according to the applicable dangerous goods regulations. They also specify which regulations are applicable for certain counties and specific modes of transports and how dangerous goods data is processed checks in sales and delivery documents.
Monitoring of Substance Volumes
In many countries, regulations state that, above a certain quantity of chemicals and other hazardous substances, you must register with the authorities the maximum quantities of these substances that you plan to purchase, import, produce, sell, or export within a certain period.
With the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release, substance volume tracking helps you you can get an overview of the aggregated volumes of substances that are imported or produced by a specific legal entity of your company.
Substance volume tracking is integrated with the logistic processes for purchasing and manufacturing. It tracks, calculates, aggregates, and monitors the imported and produced substance volumes that result from these processes. By comparing the recorded quantities with the limit values, the system can warn you in good time before a limit value is exceeded, and if a limit value is exceeded, the system can also block the respective business process. This means you can ensure that you stay below the quantity limits.
Figure 1: New SAP Fiori app to monitor substance volumes and display details regarding tracked and aggregated substance volumes
Key Features for this release are:
- Get an overview of the tracked substances and their aggregated volumes.
- Check the substances that need your attention sorted at the top of a color-coded list.
- Filter and sort the overview table for the aggregated substance volumes by various criteria and save your filter settings.
- View the aggregated substance volumes by month and scenario.
- View the material document items from which the substance volumes originate.
- Navigate to the Material Documents Overview app to see the complete flow of the business process documents.
- Update the aggregated volumes by initiating an on-demand calculation.
Integration of Product Compliance into Sales Contract and Sales Quotation Management
Contract Management is becoming more and more tangled with the Sales process. For Sales, contract management is used to automate and enable faster, more accurate production and delivery of legal-approved contracts to a company’s prospects or customers. This way, sales can focus on customer relationship management, communications, and revenue production.
The integration of compliance information into sales and delivery means the following: Only those materials that are marked in the material master as valid for compliance checks are considered.
For compliance-relevant materials, compliance checks run in sales and delivery documents. Depending on the kind of documents, the system issues warnings or blocks items or entire documents.
Sales representatives can request a compliance status for a material when they want to sell it in a country/region where no current compliance assessment for the material exists.
With this 2020 release, we have established a way to view the status of compliance checks of product marketability, dangerous goods, and safety data sheets in sales contracts and sales quotation management, in addition to other enhancements to the sales and delivery processes. This prevents executions of non-compliant sales orders for all relevant products and therefore assures compliant transport regarding dangerous goods regulations.
In other words, SAP S/4HANA now allows you to create a sales contract that contains compliance-relevant materials and the system carries out compliance checks that verify the following:
- Is the product marketable in certain countries?
- Are all safety data sheets available in the required languages?
- Is the transport of this product allowed?
The results of these compliance checks are displayed as statuses in the sales contract.
Figure 2: ‘Integration of Product Compliance into Sales Contract’ enables users to gain insights for example into dangerous goods information on sales contract documents and prevents execution of non-compliant sales orders
Process
If a product has been marked as relevant for compliance in the product master, the system checks marketability data in real-time as an internal sales representative is creating or editing a sales document and determines item and header status as described below.
Determination of the Item Status
- The system determines the status of an item in a sales document as follows:
- If the item is not compliant relevant, the system allows further processing of the item.
- If the item is approved or approved as an exemption, the system allows further processing of the item.
- If the item is not approved as an exemption, not marketable, or has a decision pending, the item is blocked.
Improve Processing of Events and Tasks in the Background
With this feature, you can do the following in the Process Product Compliance Events and Process Product Compliance Tasks apps:
- View the status of changes to substances, products, raw materials, and supplier raw materials.
- Export events or tasks to a spreadsheet.
- Use a callback function to correct fatal event errors.
- Filter by event type.
- Create variants.
- Enable SAP Cloud Platform Job Scheduler for events.
- Validate and restart the background processing of new and in-progress tasks and events.
Figure 3: Increase the robustness of the solution through improved processing of tasks and events
Process Product Compliance Events
With this SAP Fiori app, you can display an overview of user actions that affect compliance objects. The system captures and processes this data to ensure that all compliance data is kept current. Depending on the event, the system determines the affected objects and carries out follow-on actions. For each object that needs to be processed, a separate task is triggered. For example, if a user adds a compliance requirement to an active compliance purpose, the system creates the relevant compliance assessments, propagates the assessments to subordinate products and raw materials according to the compliance pattern, carries out a compliance check of the affected products and raw materials, and releases the new assessments automatically where possible.
Process Product Compliance Tasks
With this SAP Fiori app, you can view all tasks that have been triggered as parts of product compliance events. A separate task is needed for each affected object for each event. You can reprocess failed tasks as well as check which tasks are new, in progress or completed. To troubleshoot an individual task, you can navigate to the object page of the task to view the task log and related events. If the task has failed, you can check the log, solve the root cause of the processing failure, and process the task again.
Extended Composition Management
With this feature in the Unpackaged Product - Material-Based Composition app, you can view and edit the composition of materials for an unpackaged product, including all materials put into production. You can adapt the composition as needed. The released composition is used to evaluate if the product meets compliance requirements based on raw material and supplier data.
Note: The Unpackaged Product - Composition of Materials app is replaced by the new Unpackaged Product - Material-Based Composition app with enhanced functions for managing compositions.
Figure 4: Improve data quality, data accuracy, and results through the extended composition management
With the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release, you can now:
- maintain in the Unpackaged Product - Material-Based Composition app, the composition of materials used for input, including produced substances. The system provides a calculation of the analytical and legal substance-based compositions.
- create legal deviations for produced substances from this app based on legal requirements from different legal areas.
- enhance the accuracy of data and to make data entries more comfortable in the Unpackaged Product - Legal Composition app and in the Unpackaged Product - Analytical Composition app. Operators have added automatically, intervals can be entered in one field, and entered decimal places are retained.
- view the change history of analytical compositions, legal compositions, and material-based compositions of unpackaged products and raw materials. You can check when the composition has been changed or released when new versions have been created, and which users initiated these actions. This feature is available in the Unpackaged Product - Legal Composition, Unpackaged Product - Analytical Composition, and Unpackaged Product - Material-Based Composition apps.
Analysis of marketability assessments
Whit this innovation for the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release you can visualize and filter existing marketability assessments for products in the new SAP Fiori app Analyse Marketability Assessments - For Products.
Figure 5: Powerful reports and analytics provide visibility into the compliance of individual products, raw materials, and the whole product portfolio, and enable everyone in the company to retrieve compliance information easily
You can use this app to:
- Get an overview of marketability requirements that you need to assess for products.
- Filter and search for marketability assessments of products.
- Create your own filter variants to prioritize your work.
- Assign, change, or remove the processor of a marketability assessment.
- Release marketability assessments.
- Export the values displayed in the overview of a spreadsheet.
Note: This app is built using Analytical List Page technology. For more information about the Analytical List Page technology, see Analytical List Page.
Regulatory Content Update
The basis and foundation for the marketability is the management of compliance requirements. With the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release, we have enlarged the regulatory content. The update provides
- Product Marketability: 133 new or updated compliance requirements
- Safety Data Sheets: 51 new or updated compliance requirements
- Dangerous Goods: 9 new or updated compliance requirements.
Figure 6: Regulatory content update to reduce time to market and extend marketability
You can find these compliance requirements in the Activate Compliance Requirements app for each solution area. In this SAP Fiori app, we include also a new feature and now you can compare a new or updated compliance requirement version with an existing version.
Figure 7: Update content and new features for the foundation of marketability
If you are also interested in Product Compliance for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, I would like to draw your attention to my blog SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Product Compliance – The Link Collection
For more information on SAP S/4HANA 2020, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA release info: com/s4hana
- SAP S/4HANA Community here
- SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
- Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
- Join the SAP S/4HANA Movement
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA here
- Help Portal Product Page here
Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via @VoglerChrist and LinkedIn
- SAP Managed Tags:
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