Practical Guide to SAP GTS Part 1: SPL Screening and Compliance Management

2.4 Embargo checking in SAP GTS

Today’s world of trade requires your business to be able to ship and receive goods as quickly as possible. You must be ready at a moment’s notice. At the same time, governments also work just as quickly. Relationships between countries change at a moment’s notice and you must be ready for that as well. The best way to be prepared for global changes is using embargo checking. Embargo checking allows you to screen the ship-to country for export partners and ship-from country for import partners. It also allows you to block any transactions shipped to or from embargo countries.

Embargo checking is performed when a business partner is created. Therefore, if you have a business partner created in ECC and transferred to SAP GTS, it will screen the business partner for an embargo. With business partner transfer, if screens the business partner against the embargo list maintained in GTS. If it finds a match, it blocks the customer for embargo.

Concerning transactions, you might use a sales order or stock transport order, followed by an outbound delivery note, to ship out the product. When a sales order is created, the Business Partner (BP) will be reviewed against the BP embargo checking, and if the customer is blocked for embargo reasons, it will block the sales or any outbound transaction. With the GTS block on the sales document, you can configure it to stop the further processing of the sales document; that is, stop the delivery note creation. Similarly, with a purchase order, if you have a vendor under embargo block, the system checks for the embargo block with the vendor and blocks the purchase order.

SAP GTS manages embargo situations as services within compliance, and you can control the different legs for embargo or maintain different country list regulations. Most importantly, the SAP GTS master data maintains these countries, which means you do not have to go through configuration settings.

Figure 2.12: shows the embargo setting with the SAP GTS cockpit. You can access it using transaction code /SAPSLL/MENU_LEGAL • Legal Control-Export or Import • Maintain Country-Specific Information. In SAP GTS, you can also maintain embargo countries for import processes or legs.

Figure 2.12: Embargo settings in SAP GTS master data

With the country-specific information, list all of the countries that you ship to or ship from, and when you double click on the entry, it will get copied over to the Time Series section with default dates as shown in Figure 2.12: In the time series section, check the Embargo box. However, the line that is displayed cannot be edited. To do this, you must first duplicate the line with the Duplicate Row button (). Next, check the box in this row and then delete the previous row.

Many embargos apply to both imports and exports. For embargos limited to a specific direction (inbound or outbound), you can use transaction code /SAPSLL/MENU_LEGAL • Legal Control-Export or Import • Legal Reg. / Country of Dept/Destination.

Figure 2.13: Embargo setting based on country of departure/destination

Figure 2.13 shows the master data maintenance for embargo based on the country of departure and country of destination. In the legal regulation, you need to key in the legal regulation and in the first country field the country of departure and in the second country field the country of destination. Legal regulation represents the highest entity in GTS against which the different GTS services are configured and data services are activated.

You can also have an embargo list that is specific to a legal regulation (see Figure 2.14). Legal regulations represent the country legal customs laws and regulations. Therefore, if you want to maintain an embargo list specific to a country or legal regulation for exporting from and importing into that country, you can use this functionality.

Figure 2.14: Embargo settings: legal regulation-specific

Use the functionality shown in Figure 2.14 to maintain countries that are the under embargo specific to a legal regulation. In the example shown, the regulation is EMBUN, but you can create as many regulations as necessary. In this screen, maintain the legal regulation and the country of departure or country of destination. Legal regulation can be active for export or import, and based on the activation, the country listed here will apply to those transactions (export/outbound or import/inbound).