26 Jun Benefits of Using SAP GTS for Legal Controls
As you dive deeper into international trade waters, the legal controls you must execute to remain compliant become more entangling and complex. Ensuring compliance with import and export controls is important in conducting trade and in creating new avenues for growth. It requires critical thinking and a precise approach with little room for error.
SAP GTS offers a global businesses a regulatory and competitive advantage. It helps regulate legal controls through in-depth functionalities, helping you meet and maintain legal requirements for imports and exports. In short: Compliance management.
Discover Which SAP GTS Legal Controls Are Right for You
Legal controls are a part of every aspect of trade conducted both globally and domestically. Perhaps most concerning to global trade activities is the management of legal controls, transactions, and product classification codes. While master data is an important part of trade, the key to meeting compliance is to understand the origins and destinations of your inbound and outbound materials/products. With SAP GTS, you can maintain legal controls while ensuring accuracy in your classification code and license checking processes, including sanctioned party lists.
SAP GTS presents in-depth legal control functionality within the compliance management sub-module (CM). Functionalities within this sub-module give you several types of automated legal controls, including:
- Defining regulations;
- Applying legal regulations
- Licensing:
- ECCN monitoring; and
- Document management.
This provides global businesses with the required building blocks needed to build compliance processes throughout the organization. Precise automations can pinpoint the list of legal requirements for an ECCN while accounting for departure and destination requirements, which tend to be overlooked.
Legal control functions within SAP GTS allow for a high level of customization. Export license determination via license types can be customized and automated to handle via ECCN, country of origin, departure point, and destination. The information no longer needs be entered or uploaded into your GTS system manually. It will update automatically through a subscription-based model that is tied into trade regulatory agencies and state departments. This level of automation minimizes human mistakes; your processes will be locked down, and audits will be easier and more effective.
Define and Validate Legal Controls Through Simulation Testing
Another benefit to managing legal control functions through SAP GTS is the ability to apply and simulate trade scenarios. This is essential when conducting business in new markets or with new trading partners. In a simulation, you can accurately determine how products would move under different trade conditions, allowing you to remediate problems before going live. The meticulous levels of defining and confirming that you are, and will be, compliant with current import/export laws is priceless, as is the ease in which your simulated scenarios can be implemented into production.
Defining and validating legal controls in SAP GTS increases the opportunities for automating SPL and embargo list processing that aids in reducing risk, cost, and production time. You can develop and implement procedures for the management of dynamic FTAs, such as Brexit and NAFTA/USMCA, or to address embargo concerns, such as recent trade developments with the US and China. Reduced human error, accurate automations, and up-to-date master data greatly reduce your global risk.
Seizing the Opportunity for Effective Master Data
Legal controls can help ensure that your data and resources are accurate and updated regularly. Data providers offer reliable data subscription for automated processes that fully manage legal control data and ultimately yield high ROI with risk reduction. Effective data management is important: a Data provider list’s data is often more than you need, and processing unnecessary data takes longer.
In addition to simulation and management abilities, accurate master data lets you identify and block payments or shipments to and from sanctioned parties. When master data is imported and applied correctly, delays are reduced in all areas of trade. This requires precise execution and strong follow through on the business side.
This is where having the right partner on your team comes into play. They work with you to narrow the scope around your export licensing data to certify that you only get the data you need. It is imperative to align legal requirements with your business processes correctly on the first attempt. Once you do, you’ll have improved accuracy and management of master data for imports and exports—and an agile legal control strategy that will keep operations running smoothly.
Expert Analysis Reduces Global Trade Risk
Global trade thrives on business process consistency and predictability. It takes volumes of knowledge and long experience to create the finely-tuned machine that handles it all. An SAP GTS expert will get the most out of the solution for you, including precisely-executed legal controls.