Incoming Quality Certificates from Vendors via e-mail

[Former Member]

Dear experts, I am currently investigating the feasibility of implementing a business process for receiving quality certificates from vendors via e-mail.

Scenario:

All in all the main idea is to offer our vendors a global point of contact for deploying any required quality certificates by using a single e-mail address such as "certificates@mycompany.com". Vendors could then forward the quality certificates as PDF attachments on e-mail with PO information. In our side we should have a way to digitally certify the vendor's email address in order to prevent spam. Once we get the e-mail from vendor so the certificate attachments should be transferred to SAP (via EAI?) in order to get standard incoming certificate record created for the PO (via iDoc's?)

Your comments and feedbacks will be highly appreciated.

Cheers, Julio.

[busyaban7 · Accepted solution]

Hi Julio,

I would try answering to your queries. I think you can try adopting the approaches best suitable to your business process.

To my understanding, the main step here is to store the incoming QC form vendor in SAP and apply digital signature on top of it to validate the matter of certificate received. Please can you explain exactly you meant by stating "digitally certify the vendor's email address in order to prevent spam". Do you not use/need not like to use digital signature for the received content? or??

1. I think, based on the received emails (certificates@mycompany.com ), you can create a incoming QC in SAP. For that you need to activate -

a) QM in procurement setup in SAP, based on business complexity & needs.

b) Add QM Control key and Certificate type in Material Master - QM view.

c) Add inspection type "01" (GR Inspection) or "0101" (Source Inspection) based on business need.

NOTE: There are many knowledge documents available for this topic, so I am not adding anything here.

2. Vendor will send emails where they will attach the source inspection certificate, PurOrd number, PurOrd Item number, Material number, Batch Number, etc). Please create a inbound QC in SAP using QC51/QC52 for purchase order, item, material, batch. This part can be done manually to create a record in table QCPR Or by receiving inbound IDoc Message type QCERT, Basic type  QALITY02. Both will do the same thing.

3. While the initial QC record is created manually, the user can validate QC status, ex, 2 (Received), 5 (Received and validated), etc and add digital signature while uploading the external vendor QC in GOS server. You can check with ABAP team to analyze and activate Digital signature only when the QC status = 5 and a PDF document is updated. As this part can be done manually, so the spam validation can be done manually. I am not sure how to automate this part.

4. Once Digital Signature is added for QC, the results should be reflected in DSAL logs. You can put your own structure in DSAL display to make this Tcode a helpful tool for users.

Hope this high level solution works for your business case.

Thanks,

Arijit

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Arijit for your inputs. Your approach is quite the same I was thinking about to propose as the technical solution. On the meantime my question was placed here I have contacted my architecture/security teams about the same topic and they have identified a high security risk of enabling incoming external e-mails in the SAP SMTP. The solution on SAP side would be fine from QM perspective, however I was told to think about developing an internet portal to the vendors to get the certificates forwarded rather than using e-mail. Cheers, Julio.