License determination based on BP business area

[former_member598105]

Dear GTS experts,

I am facing a business requirements for compliance where a given license type is required depending on the customer's business area.

E.g: if goods are sold to a distributor license XYZ is required, if sold to an end customer no license is required

Another example: sales order should be blocked if classified goods are sold to a specific business area: transaction is fine for research industry but not for food or pharma.

Has anyone faced this situation before? If yes what was the approach to deal with it?

Thank you very much

[former_member215181]

Hi Nicolas,

The extent of Compliance checks can be controlled by Sales Order type or Item Category.  If you cannot arrange to use different Order Types to segregate the business situations, then one idea might be to code the BAdI or user-exit to "spoof" the Item Category according to your business rules.  GTS will then perform the necessary checks according to the situation.

Hope that helps.

Regards,

Dave

[former_member598105]

Hi Dave,

The issue is that both order types and item categories are the same (OR/TAN). Thus I cannot use that as a criteria.

I was wondering if there could be a field in the BP masterdata that can be used to identify the business area/category of BPs which can be defined in the feeder system and transferred over to GTS and a Badi/user exit which can be used during license type determination process to trigger a given license type based on that BP flag?

Thanks

[former_member215181]

Hi Nicolas,

I think you've missed my point.  Whatever flag or field you can use to identify the business situation, could be used in the Plug-In BAdI (/SAPSLL/IFEX_SD0A_R3) to adjust the Item Category code sent to GTS.

You would then map those codes (they don't have to be real ones) to GTS Item Categories, and then configure the appropriate Compliance Checks for each.

Apologies if it's me who is missing the point.

Regards,

Dave

[former_member598105]

Hi Dave,

The thing is that I need to make a distinction at the time of the license type determination. Both situation (end user customer vs distributor or research vs pharma) will need to hit the legal control check.

In such case, even if I change the item category on the fly to have a mapping against a different document type, this new document type will also be relevant for Legal Control and I will get the same result in the end.

What I need to do is once a given legal regulation has been triggered in GTS I need to check the "type" of customer so I can tweak the license types that are required to release the order.

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough in the first place or if I misunderstood your suggestion

Regards

Nicolas

[mouaz_benredjeb]

Hello Nicolas,

In ECC, in the sales document, do the end user customer and distributor have the same standard partner function "ship-to" ?

Regards.

Mouaz BEN REDJEB

[former_member598105]

Hello Mouaz,

Yes both type of customer have the same partner function "Ship-To"

Regards

Nicolas

[mouaz_benredjeb]

What a pity... If they had different partner function we may have been able to use the partner group at license type level in order to drive the license determination based on the partner function..

The other idea I had is to use the partner function in the license type. You would have then 2 licenses types, one for the End customer and one for the distributors.

When creating the license master data, you define under each license type the relevant "ship-to" in order for the system to pick the correct license when doing the license determination.

The drawback of this solution is that you need to define under each license type the whole list of End customers or distributors in order for the system to pick the correct one. If an End customer or Distributor is missing in both licenses, then the sales flow will be blocked and a user will have to "add" the customer either to the End customer license or the distributor license.

The End customer license being in this case a "dummy" license only used to not block the sale to the End Customer.

If this solution is too heavy, then I guess the only option left is to work with BADIs. Here is a suggestion:

- In ECC side, during transfer of sales document, used BADI /SAPSLL/IFEX_SD0A_R3 method IF_EXTEND_CON_CDOC in order to populate field CS_ITM_CDOC-GEN-PRODUCT_ENDUSE with some value to indicate if it is an End Customer sale or distributor

- In GTS side, use BADI /SAPSLL/LCC_DOCUMENT method LICENSE_TYPES_GET in order to read the value of IS_ITEM-ENDUSE which should have the same value populated in previous step in ECC. Based on this value, drive the correct license type to check.

Warning: I am not a big fan of using existing fields in order to divert them from what they are meant to be used. Who knows all the processes in GTS were such field can used. In your case, we are diverting the field to use it for Compliance but impacts on Customs side should be assessed. in case of doubts, better go for the 3 free additional data fields provided by SAP.