Illustrating the Product Compliance Solution Areas

In this lesson, you’ll discover the key functions and processes of the SAP Product Compliance solution areas. Learn about Dangerous Goods Management, the significance of logistic-integrated compliance checks in ascertaining product appropriateness for sales transactions, and embedded regulatory content, providing the legal basis for compliance.

Compliance Data Foundation, on one hand, frames the conceptual basis of Product Compliance with its solution areas and, on the other hand, provides essential processes to manage basic compliance data. This relates to:

• Managing compliance requirements and compliance purposes, which constitute regulations or policies as the basis for compliance assessments.
• Managing Substances Compliance: Company substances linked to legally listed substances represent the chemical basis for compliance assessment.
• Managing Basic Compliance Data: This is applicable to products and underlying raw materials. This data sets the stage for assessments and compliance calculations specific to each solution area. An important aspect here is the calculation of composition data along the product hierarchy, finally providing a substance-related perspective that is key for almost any compliance subject.

The solution area Product Marketability (PMA) focuses on the Sales and Production business processes that you must manage, including applicable compliance obligations.

For Production, you must assess the compliance of raw materials going into production and the resulting products with the respective regulations of the countries or regions in which your company produces. From a logistics perspective, this relates, for example, to the plant views maintained for a product in the product master.

For Sales, you must ensure compliance with the regulations of the market countries in addition to the production countries. From a logistics perspective, this relates, for example, to the distribution chains maintained for a product in the product master, respectively, the countries to which you ship the product.

To serve these objectives, PMA provides three major assessment levels:

1. Product
2. Raw Material with the supplier's raw material
3. Substance

As compliance requirements spread through the product hierarchy to subordinate levels, the compliance results from the underlying levels are used to calculate results at higher levels.

Finally, you consolidate the compliance results of individual product requirements.

This market assessment result per country and business process is used by the integrated compliance checks in logistics.

Logistic integrated compliance checks evaluate the compliance status when processing sales transactions to ascertain that the product complies with applicable marketability requirements.

The scope items related to the solution area Product Marketability reflect these levels and functions:

• Chemical Compliance Approval for Purchased Material and Supplier (‏31G‏), which is the major task of the Master Data Specialist - Product Compliance role
• Assess Marketability of a Product (‏31H‏) - assigned to the role Product Stewardship Specialist - Product Compliance
• Chemical Compliance in Sales (‏31J‏) - integrates checks against marketability assessment results into sales processes

The embedded regulatory content provides the legal basis, defining the marketability requirements to be assessed.

Safety Data Sheet Management (SDS) comprises two major functional areas, which are mirrored by two related scope items:

• Management of regulatory data and assignment of country- and language-specific safety data sheets to products - scope item: Manage Safety Data Sheets for Products (‏3VR‏)
• Logistic-integrated safety data sheet checks and shipment-scope item Safety Data Sheets in Sales (‏3VQ‏)

The embedded regulatory content provides compliance requirements for Safety Data Sheet Management (SDS-CR), which imply languages required per country, so that you can specifically assign the translated SDS. Along comes the country-specific, regulation-based timeline regarding your responsibility for subsequent shipments. This legal information is essential for integrated SDS checks and to control automated SDS shipments, which you can monitor to solve shipment issues and thus safeguard compliance.

Dangerous Goods Management comprises two major functional areas, which are mirrored by two related scope items.

The dangerous goods assessment is processed in two consecutive steps:

1. Assessing the unpackaged product means identifying the dangerous goods, which results in defining the dangerous goods' basic description.
2. Assessment of the packaged product - only the packaged product is permitted for transport. This final classification not only implies assigning the packaging (a tank is also a kind of packaging because it is required to make the product transportable) but can also mean, for example, applying a special provision for the packaged product, resulting in the comprehensive dangerous goods description for legally required documentation.

The embedded regulatory content provides both the required data from the specific dangerous goods list and text patterns used to generate documentation per dangerous goods regulation or applicable labels and marks.