Offline Screening of Sanctioned Party Lists

I am currently working on implementing offline screening functionality. This is a new area on which I have no idea. So, as usual I turned to SCN for details. There is not much content on offline screening of sanctioned party lists on SCN. Whatever content available is also in bits and pieces and have to be searched for in several threads and blogs. So, I have consolidated my learning and findings in this blog. This may be helpful for those few who are looking for details on offline screening of SPL.

SPL Screening Vs. Offline SPL Screening

Offline screening is different from the normal screening of documents or partners that happens in the GTS system.

Normal SPL screening or SPL screening process:

SPL screening denotes screening business partners created in GTS or partners transferred from ECC to GTS against SPL master data. SPL screening always happens with reference to a connected ECC system.

Master Data for SPL:

SPL master data is provided majorly by MKData and some other providers. The SPL data comes in the form of a XML file suitably formatted by data providers to be uploaded in GTS. For several companies, this upload of SPL master data is an automatic process that runs in background. The transaction used to upload SPL master data is /SAPSLL/SPL_UL01:

Screening Partners:

Whenever a business partner (customer/vendor/employee or any kind of partner) is created in ECC, based on configuration settings, it is transferred to GTS and are created there as Business Partners of specific type.

The partner is checked against the SPL master data (synchronously or asynchronously based on config), if there is a match, then the partner is blocked.

Screening Documents:

Whenever a document from ECC is transferred to GTS, the partner in it is checked against the SPL master data. If there is a match, then the document is blocked.

Offline SPL Screening:

Offline SPL screening is screening a list of parties coming from a non-SAP system against SPL master data in GTS.

Offline screening happens for ad-hoc parties which a company wants to screen like a prospective employee/customer/vendor that are not created as a business partner in GTS.

Offline screening does not happen with reference to ECC system.

Offline SPL screening is also called External address screening which explains that it is used to screen addresses or parties external to any SAP (ECC/GTS) system.

Transaction for Offline Screening:

The transaction code for Offline screening is /SAPSLL/SPL_CHSO3.

As seen in the screenshot above, Legal Regulation and Group of External Logical Systems are mandatory fields.

We can perform offline screening for one legal regulation at a time, which means parties belonging to the same country can be screened together.

It is better to create a new external logical system group for offline screening.

Input Data for SPL Screening:

Input data for screening must be in the form of XML.  This can be prepared by anyone who wants to screen ad-hoc parties. However, the input file must have the following XML structure:

Fields here, other than Name1/Name2/Name3/Name4 are optional. If there is no data in either one of the Name fields, the offline screening transaction throws an error.

The output file returned by the transaction is also of XML format. The user should specify a file here with a .xml extension.

The input/output files can be either on presentation server or application server.

The output XML format can be chosen from the existing options:

The checkbox “Output Results” when checked shows the result of SPL result on screen else just writes the screening result to the output XML file.

This transaction when run in the back ground, writes the screening result and false positive report in a XML file as output as shown below:

When the offline screening transaction is run in the foreground, the screening result and false positive report are displayed in the form of ALV.

False Positive list is the list of all sanctioned parties from the SPL master data which have similarities to the input name/address. The number and nature of false positive matches pulled again depends on configuration settings.

Sample output when the transaction /SAPSLL/SPL_CHSO3 is run in foreground:

When a blocked party is double-clicked on, the details for partner’s sanctioned party list entity / the false positive list appears as shown below:

When each of the detailed record is selected, further details are displayed on the right side:

If the audit trail / log of screening has to be saved to the GTS system, then for every legal regulation there is a requirement, the “Write Audit Trail for external Addresses” must be checked in the “Control Settings for SPL Screening:

To view this audit trail, go to transaction /SAPSLL/SPL_AT_ADR and give the legal regulation for which audit trail is required. This transaction cannot be run in the background.

Hope this blog helps a few out there.