Supply Chain Management Blogs by SAP
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ReemaJones
Advisor
Advisor
This is the second of a series of blog posts explaining the fundamentals of SAP Business Network Material Traceability. If you’d first like a brief introduction to our solution, read What is Material Traceability? by Mark Averskog.
“Material flows should be digitally traceable throughout the entire supply chain. Last but not least, legislators will demand transparency in the near future.”(https://catena-x.net/en/vision-goals)

In this post, we’ll talk about how Material Traceability allows you to trace every single part, piece, component, subcomponent, object, item (whatever you want to call it) that went into making a finished product.

Initially developed in cooperation with leading companies from the food supply chain, Material Traceability enables them to strengthen transparency and sustainability by connecting the entire supply chain. However, Material Traceability used to be limited to batch-managed products, such as foodstuffs, cosmetics, or chemical products. But then we had to look at getting ready to support the mission of the Catena-X Automotive Network: “to enable the digital flow of information across the entire supply chain”(https://catena-x.net/en/vision-goals). The automotive supply chain, that is.

You can read more about the role of SAP Business Network in Catena-X in the words of Paige Cox.

Challenge accepted


Since March 2022, Material Traceability can be used to digitally represent supply chains with:

  • Only batches,

  • Only serialized products, and

  • Both batch-managed and serialized products.


This doesn’t just mean that Material Traceability can be used for the automotive industry, but also for other types of discrete manufacturing, such as the production of electronics.

This video was published at the same time as our release of the Serialized Products app and the update of our Alerts app to support serialized products:



More recently, we’ve done more work on Material Traceability to make sure you can integrate serialized product data from SAP S/4HANA and SAP ERP. For more information, read Mark’s post about our most important Q1 releases this year.

Want to know more?


Check out this page and read our solution brief.

You can read more about events in Material Traceability and how they link together in the first post of this series.

And… stay tuned for the third post in this series, where we’ll look at how Material Traceability can be used for carbon labelling.