Mapping Legal Norms in SAP GTS

In SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA, organizational units such as company codes, plants, or sales organizations are the main basis of process-related system configuration. Many Customizing settings in Logistics and Accounting are dependent on organizational units.

There are no organizational units in SAP GTS. From the perspective of system configuration, the legal regulations take the place of organizational units. Most of the Customizing settings in SAP GTS are used to configure legal regulations for the individual application areas.

From a technical perspective, legal regulations are alphanumeric keys that are defined in Customizing of the SAP GTS system and are linked to a large number of control parameters. Most of these control parameters depend on the application area in which the legal regulation is to be used. Thus, for example, you define the scope and strictness of the address check at the level of a legal regulation for sanctioned party list screening.

It is not always appropriate to use the legal regulations contained in delivery Customizing without making changes to them. It is also possible that there is no model that meets your requirements. In such cases, you create your own legal regulations in the customer name space. To do so, in Customizing of the SAP GTS system, choose the menu path SAP Global Trade Services, edition for SAP HANA → General Settings → Legal Regulations → Define Legal Regulation.

The configuration of the legal regulations contained in delivery Customizing corresponds to the legal situation at the time of delivery. Legal changes that take effect after this time may result in changes to the system configuration. If a legal change has resulted in adjustments to the program code, you can update your system by implementing support packages. Delivery Customizing is also constantly adjusted in this way. In any case, you must ensure that knowledgeable employees keep track of relevant legal changes and, if necessary, initiate configuration changes or make configuration changes themselves.

In the EU, foreign trade law is shaped to a large extent by Council and European Parliament regulations. Nevertheless, considerable discretion is available to the national legislature of the Member States. Therefore, before you start an implementation in an EU Member State, you have to decide the following for each application area of Compliance Management:

• Whether you map the relevant legal provisions on a country-specific or cross-country basis or not

• Whether you combine supranational and national legislation into a single legal regulation or not

For the purpose of legal control in SAP GTS, it is usually necessary to create a new legal regulation to map the relevant national foreign trade law of the respective Member State in conjunction with the relevant EU regulations. In individual cases, the separation of Union law and national foreign trade law into two separate legal bases may be useful instead. In the example in the figure "Mapping of Legal Norms as Legal Regulations", Council Regulation (EU) No. 2021/821 (Dual-Use Regulation) and German foreign trade law were combined into the legal regulation ZDUDE (Dual-Use Regulation, German foreign trade law).

For the embargo check and the sanctioned party list screening, you can also combine several legal norms into a single legal regulation. This means that it is not necessary to map each of the many EU embargo regulations separately. Instead, the regulations for imposing country-specific embargoes can be summarized as a single legal regulation for the purposes of the embargo check. Delivery Customizing even goes one step further: The legal regulation EMBUN (Embargo - United Nations) is to map all embargoes resulting from United Nations Security Council (UNSC) decisions in a neutral form. It could therefore be used globally.