NEW Substance Volume Tracking - S/4HANA for Product compliance

[Shush971]

Hello all, hoping anyone can help.

First of all this relates to the NEW S/4HANA Product Compliance module, and NOT the "classic" Product safety / EHSM applications. 

I have gone through all of the material of S/4HANA Product compliance material (2022 on SAP learning hub, "product compliance in a nutshell" on OpenSAP, and 2023 on help.sap.com) so I have a fairly good idea of the core concept and the main goals (side note - if anyone wants to get in touch with me with anything Product compliance s/4 related, send me a message :)). 

I am exploring the substance volume tracking solution area and I have a few questions that hopefully the SAP experts can answer. 

- Can anyone confirm if the ability to perform checks in the value chain is available for SVT on 2023? I can see that for Product marketability, dangerous goods, and SDS, there are check/block features available, however for SVT I cannot find anything in relation to this. So far, it only looks like we can just view the thresholds via the "monitor substance volumes" app. But is there anyway to actually block transactions if, say, the volume goes above the threshold?

- I fully understand that to get the most out of the module, we should use Product Marketability before SVT or SDS management. But can anyone confirm that functionally, we can use substance volume tracking separately without using product marketability? Current thinking is if it possible to deploy the Product Marketability processes at a later time, and deploy SVT (and SDS) functionality first. It looks like this is possible to me technically (i.e. setup a compliance requirement that is SVT relevant).

- There seems to be only a limited number of compliance requirements available that are SVT relevant. I am just curious to know why is that? In my simple mind, I would have expected for all "substance list check" compliance requirements to be SVT relevant as well? I guess for now, we can take the existing "best practice" requirements, and create a new version from that. 

shamelessly tagging: @christoph_bergemann @Michael_Schalk 🙂

Many thanks in advance

Shashi

[Michael_Schalk · Accepted solution]

Hello Shashi,

Thank you for your interest in our new Substance Volume Tracking solution in SAP S/4HANA for product compliance.

Regarding your first question:
"- Can anyone confirm if the ability to perform checks in the value chain is available for SVT on 2023? ..."
No, the integration of the new Substance Volume Tracking functionality into the Logistic/Material Management Business Documents like Sales Orders, Deliveries, Purchase Orders or Process-/Production Orders is not available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023 / SAP S/4HANA 2023. It is also not available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 or previous Public Cloud versions.
Currently our focus is on the tracking of the so called Confirmed Substance Volumes which are calculated based on Material Documents (Goods Issue/Good Receipt). For our future planning, please refer to the SAP Road Map Explorer - Product Compliance

Regarding your second question:
"... But can anyone confirm that functionally, we can use substance volume tracking separately without using product marketability? ..."
The new Product Compliance solution has 3 main Capabilities:
- Product Marketability and Chemical Compliance, 
- Dangerous Goods Management
- Safety Data Sheet and Label Management
Substance Volume Tracking is a Key Feature which belongs to the Capability Product Marketability and Chemical Compliance. Therefore saying that Substance Volume Tracking can be used without Product Marketability would not be correct.
Substance Volume Tracking in its current version starts from a material document (e.g. a Goods Receipt for a Purchase Order). From this material document and referenced logistic/material management document the system determines the Source Country, Target Country and Business Process Scenario (e.g. Source Country: Belgium, Target Country: US, Business Process Scenario: IMPORT_TO). With this information, the system is looking for relevant Compliance Requirements which are Activated (APP: Activate Compliance Requirements - Product Marketability) and Substance Volume Tracking enabled (App: Enable Substance Volume Tracking - for Compliance Requirements).
"Relevant Compliance Requirements" means, the Target Country is "equal to" or a "subset" of the Valid In definition in the header of the Compliance Requirement and the Business Process Scenario is maintained in the Substance Volume Tracking settings of the Compliance Requirement definition (e.g. for the Target Country: US and the Business Process Scenario: IMPORT_TO, the Compliance Requirements US TSCA Inventory Status and US TSCA SNUR Status would be determined as tracking relevant).
With the relevant Compliance Requirements, the system performs further evaluation and calculation steps. One of these steps is the evaluation of Product Marketability Assessments for the combination of Product/Raw Material and Compliance Requirement and the combination of Substance and Compliance Requirement.
The main functionality of Product Marketability Assessments in the context of Substance Volume Tracking at the moment is the maintenance of regulation-specific Exemptions on Product/Raw Material and/or Substance level.
If no Product Marketability Assessments for the combination of Product/Raw Material and Compliance Requirement and/or the combination of Substance and Compliance Requirement are maintained, then the system assumes that the Product/Raw Materials and/or the Substances are not exempted.
This means Substance Volume Tracking also works without Product Marketability Assessments but you would not have the possibility to maintain Product/Raw Material or Substance specific exemptions (e.g. Test market exemption for a product or Polymer meeting exemption criteria for a substance).
You could, as a workaround, set up an Analytical Composition for a Legal Area (e.g. US) and only maintain the substances in this composition which are tracking relevant, but this is not recommended or should only be used in exceptional cases because later on you would not be able to see what the exact reason was why a substance was not tracked.

Regarding your third question:
"There seems to be only a limited number of compliance requirements available that are SVT relevant. I am just curious to know why is that?"
As I had explained in the SAP Community Post: Re: SAP S/4HANA for Product Compliance: SVT - Issues with... , Substance Volume Tracking in SAP S/4HANA for product compliance is still under development and will be continuously enhanced in the future. At the moment there are still some gaps in the functionality which need to be closed before we can support further regulations and/or before we can support customer-specific Compliance Requirement definitions which are not based on our best practice content.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,
Michael Schalk (SAP)
Product Manager for Substance Volume Tracking

[Shush971 · Accepted solution]

Thank you Michael for the comprehensive response. With regards to the third answer - if we create new customer-specific CR's based on best practice content, and in a future release, new regulation CR's that are relevant to our business does get supported, is it advised to transition to that regulation-based CR? And if so, how easy would it be to do that?

[Michael_Schalk · Accepted solution]

Hello Shashi,

yes we would recommend to switch to the standard compliance requirement when it becomes available. One of the reasons is, that the compliance requirements which are part of the embedded content are being updated on a regular basis. This means e.g. that you get substance list updates automatically via the content updates.
The transition from the customer-specific compliance requirement to the standard compliance requirement would look as follows: 
You disable the customer-specific compliance requirement in the App Enable Substance Volume Tracking - for Compliance Requirements. This will stop the tracking process for this compliance requirement.
Then you have to enable the standard compliance requirement in the same app. When you enable a new compliance requirement for Substance Volume Tracking, the system will automatically start an initial tracking for the current tracking period. This means, there is no need to transfer any already tracked substance volumes which were tracked for the customer-specific compliance requirement to the standard compliance requirement.

Best regards,
Michael