New and noteworthy for SAP Business Network Material Traceability - Q1/2023

[former_member142223]

First: Integration of serialized product data from SAP S/4HANA and SAP ERP

Businesses reliant on material and product traceability for safety, compliance, sustainability or brand integrity now have more options for tracing based on integration with core systems.  Using an On-Premise SAP S/4HANA or SAP ERP backend system, you can now contribute product genealogy data for serialized products, in addition to batch-managed products, from these backend systems to the SAP Business Network Material Traceability solution. To gain this core integration, you can download, install, and configure an Add-On report to your SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA solutions. The new Add-On report will be the main vehicle to select, extract and send the data to the SAP Business Network Material Traceability solution.

This new integration capability represents a significant step forward in the automation of populating product genealogy data originally residing in SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA, which are typical “systems of record” for serial number management of products for SAP Business Network Material Traceability. This new capability will increase the speed of the integration, save time and effort through the automated sharing of serial number information with SAP Business Network Material Traceability, and reduce the risk of error in data transmission throughout the process. Most importantly, any business partner in your supply chain, e.g. a supplier, contract manufacturer, retailer and end-customer, currently also using SAP ERP and/or SAP S/4HANA can also leverage this new capability to automate and share the their product genealogy information with SAP Business Network Material Traceability, for you to improve your n-tier supply chain visibility through SAP Business Network.

Second: Spreadsheet upload of product genealogy data

Options to contribute material traceability data into the SAP Business Network Material Traceability solution continue to expand and get easier for network collaborators.  The newest additional way to contribute product genealogy data to SAP Business Network Material traceability is to upload this data using a spreadsheet/spreadsheet file through the standard solution user interface. To facilitate this process even for new contributors, a spreadsheet template is downloaded from the new “Upload Events” app for contributors to populate with the product genealogy data, which they will then upload through the “Upload Event” app, for network collaborators to leverage for extended traceability though the supply chain.

MT File Upload

This new capability represents an alternate way to contribute product genealogy data to SAP Business Network Material Traceability. In addition to the previously existing method of using an API (Application Programming Interface), which require technical mapping of data fields from an external system or file, this new way of using a spreadsheet template and uploading data via a new app in the user interface of SAP Business Network Material Traceability requires minimal technical knowledge (aside from how to fill a spreadsheet), and minimizes up-front technical data mapping, while still enabling the option for contributors to create their own automation to extract from core systems into spreadsheet. Thanks to this new capability, it is a considerably cheaper and faster way to share data with SAP Business Network Material Traceability, especially for external business partners that may not have SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA solutions and therefore cannot take advantage of the automated integration that exist for those solutions.

Together, the automated integration solution and the spreadsheet upload option make supply chain partners able to contribute material genealogy data more efficiently and accurately, thereby enhancing the material traceability that makes supply chains safer and more accountable.