Replicating Packaging Fees

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to replicate calculated fees from SAP Responsible Design and Production to SAP ERP.

Introduction

Efficiently managing packaging fees is crucial for optimizing pricing strategies and ensuring compliance with regulations. Explore how SAP's integration tools streamline this complex process, enhancing accuracy and operational synergy across systems.

Calculated Fees Replication from SAP Responsible Design and Production to SAP ERP

Packaging fees or taxes can be a factor in price calculations for a product in the same way that the customer or the delivery date are factors.

SAP Responsible Design and Production calculates fees and provides fee data, either for viewing in the Packaging Fee application or as a public API, so that you can use it in SAP ERP systems for the following purposes:

  • Sales condition records in Sales and Distribution (SD)

  • Purchasing condition records in Materials Management (MM)

  • Invoice generation using material classification, which, for example, is partially required for the Spanish plastic tax report

Note

This lesson is also relevant for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) experts and in the context of plastic packaging taxes.

Packaging Fees in SAP Responsible Design and Production

Calculated packaging fees and taxes are visible in SAP Responsible Design and Production in the Packaging Fees application.

The image shows a screenshot of the Packaging Fees application in SAP Responsible Design and Production.

Technical Approaches

The recommended technical approaches to extract and replicate fee or tax information from SAP Responsible Design and Production to SAP ERP are as follows:

  1. SAP Integration Suite is the standard approach

  2. SAP Responsible Design and Production Integration Accelerator

SAP Integration Suite

Review the following resources for the SAP Integration Suite approach:

The image outlines the technical approaches in six steps: Calculation, API, SAP Cloud Integration, SAP Cloud Integration, Intermediate Document (IDoc) and Pricing Conditions

  1. Calculation:

    Packaging fees are calculated based on a reference quantity of a product, without including transactional data. This way the data can be used as a reference to calculate the price the packaging of a product would have. The calculated packaging fees are aggregated on product level. Packaging fees are calculated for active and historic report configurations.

    For more information on fee calculation, see: Packaging Fees.

  2. API:

    An Open REST API provides access to the packaging fee data. The API provides options to configure data filtering, volume, and frequency of replications. It also supports full and delta extraction as of the last successful replication. The same API can be used for both SD or MM pricing conditions, or material classification. The consuming client can decide into which type of condition records the data is filled.

    Filters can be used to define the scope of the data that is extracted in more detail. You can define broad filters for entire countries or identify individual report configurations.

    For example, you want to feed different data to two different ERP systems:

    • ERP 1 requires the data in pricing conditions for Germany.
    • ERP 2 requires data for pricing conditions for Spain.

    For ERP 1, you would extract data for report category DE_EPR_PACK_2021. For ERP 2, you would extract data for report category ES_TAX_PACK_2023. Then, ERP 1 receives fee data for all report configurations for Germany and ERP 2 receives data for all report configurations for Spain.

    The following filter options are provided:

    • Report category (ReportCategory)
    • Country (ReportCategoryCountry)
    • Report Configuration (ReportConfiguration)
    • System Group (Context)
    • Business Process Direction (BusinessProcessDirection)
  3. SAP Cloud Integration:

    SAP Cloud Integration is a middleware, which is a standard solution that allows you to customize the fee data so that it can be shared with receiver systems that have different interfaces. The data can be split, spliced, and mapped according to the requirements of the receiving system. The feature used for this purpose is called Integration Flows (IFlows).

    For more information, see: Elements of an Integration Flow.

    SAP Responsible Design and Production provides an integration package with IFlow templates.

  4. Integration Flow (IFlow):

    The IFlow calls the API with the filter settings and maps, or it splices the fee data to make it suitable for receiving systems and their APIs.

  5. Intermediate Document (IDoc):

    For SAP ERP systems, IDoc messages are used to receive the data and to distribute it to the pricing conditions.

  6. Pricing Conditions:

    When the packaging fee data is available in the pricing conditions and you create a sales order, the sales order can access the SD pricing conditions to determine the packaging fee of a product. Similarly, when you create a purchase order, the purchase order can access the MM pricing conditions. The use cases for the data on the side of the purchase or sales orders can be determined by you. Common use cases are statistics, verification, accounting, or simply information.

Integration Package for SAP Cloud Integration

SAP provides template content in an integration package for SAP Cloud Integration. It contains template integration flows, value mappings, and instructions.

The integration package can be accessed as follows:

The integration package provides one main flow for data replication that is extended by mapping flows:

  • Create Pricing Conditions and Material Classifications in SAP ERP

    This integration flow provides the main replication logic. The flow contains sub-processes to support pulling data from SAP Responsible Design and Production, delta and pagination handling, storing next and delta links.

  • Map Packaging Fees to Pricing Conditions for Extended Producer Responsibility Reports

    This mapping integration flow extends the main flow and provides a template for replication of calculated fees and converting the data into Sales and Distribution (SD) or Materials Management (MM) pricing condition records.

    Data that cannot be mapped can be filtered out of the process.

    Upon successful mapping, a standard IDOC message (COND_A01) is sent to the SAP ERP system.

  • Map Packaging Fees to Pricing Conditions and Material Classifications for Spain Plastic Tax

    This mapping integration flow extends the main flow and provides a template for the replication of calculated fees and the conversion of data into Sales and Distribution (SD) pricing condition records for the purposes of the Spanish plastic packaging tax.

    The flow also provides capabilities to replicate the data required for invoice printing, and contains mapping to material classification based on predefined characteristics in the SAP ERP system.

    Upon successful mapping, a standard IDOC message (CLFMAS02) is sent to the SAP ERP system.

Extensibility

Extensions in the integration package allow you to extend the capabilities of the predefined integration content. They allow you to implement specific integration scenarios relevant to your business use case without changing the content provided by SAP.

For more information, see: Integration Flow Extension.

  • Additional logic to split the process into several pricing condition tables:

    The predefined SD and MM sub-processes of the integration flow send the data into a single pricing condition table. If the data needs to be split into several tables, a logic containing the required criteria for splitting the data can be added to the processes.

  • Additional logic to split the data to SD and MM modules:

    The predefined SD and MM sub-processes send the received packaging fees data to both SD and MM pricing sequentially. If the data needs to be filtered to the respective module, a logic containing the required criteria for splitting the data can be added to the processes.

  • Additional logic to route the data to multiple SAP ERP systems:

    The predefined integration flows send the data to a single SAP ERP system. This can be changed to send data to multiple SAP ERP systems.

SAP Responsible Design and Production Integration Accelerator

The current SAP Responsible Design and Production Integration Accelerator version provides functionality to transfer packaging fees from SAP Responsible Design and Production into the SAP ERP system.

The SAP Responsible Design and Production Packaging Fees integration within the SAP Responsible Design and Production Integration Accelerator package contains the following:

  • A report to retrieve packaging fees from SAP Responsible Design and Production.

    The Packaging Fee retrieval report handles the retrieval of the entity data provided by the SAP Responsible Design and Production Packaging Fee API.

  • A report for converting transferred packaging fees into pricing condition records.

    This report has to be executed manually or scheduled by customers. The Packaging Fee posting report uses the entities retrieved from the SAP Responsible Design and Production API to generate pricing conditions and posts them.

  • Sample BAdI implementation for converting transferred packaging fees into pricing condition records.

    When converting transferred packaging fees into pricing condition records, a BAdI implementation is used for the mapping. Due to the high degree of flexibility of pricing configurations, SAP does not deliver a default implementation for this.

How to Retrieve Packaging Fees via SAP Responsible Design and Production Integration Accelerator

Choose Watch Demo to start the simulation.

Summary

  • Understand why replicating packaging fees from SAP Responsible Design and Production to SAP ERP is crucial for accurate pricing calculations and compliance.

  • View packaging fees in SAP Responsible Design and Production's Packaging Fees application for analysis and extraction.

  • Extract and replicate packaging fees using SAP Integration Suite or the SAP Responsible Design and Production Integration Accelerator for seamless data transfer to SAP ERP.

  • Utilize SAP Cloud Integration to customize and map fee data for different SAP ERP systems and pricing conditions.

  • Implement extensibility options within integration flows to meet specific business requirements.