Show TOC

Component documentationRecycling Administration

 

In many countries, environmental law obliges companies to provide certification to account for the packaging materials produced and the number of finished products manufactured and brought to the market, and to collect and dispose of these at the end of the product life cycle. These kinds of regulations, along with an increased public awareness of environmental issues, provides companies today with new challenges.

In addition to the standard manufacture and sale of products, companies are often now responsible for the correct disposal and recycling of their waste products. Most companies absolve themselves of the duty to perform these tasks themselves by collaborating with “recycling partners” such as the Duales System Deutschland (DSD), who provide a general collection system in return for a license fee. The recycling partner organizes the collection, sorting, processing, and recycling of the waste packaging.

The focus of the Recycling Administration (REA) component is the item-based or weight-based fee calculation for specific materials, as well as end-to-end transparency and implementation of the legal reporting requirements to environmental authorities. REA supports you when entering, managing, and billing the necessary recycling data.

REA affords your company quality, control, and flexibility when settling quantity flows with recycling partners in recycling administration. It also caters for transparent quantity and cash flows in the company. This allows you to reduce your process costs and manage articles and packaging more efficiently. Consequently, REA supports you in minimizing the costs incurred during recycling administration.

With REA, you can include projected recycling fees in your price calculation. REA uses ERP standard conditions with which the system calculates fees for articles or accruals in Sales and Distribution (SD) or Materials Management (MM) price determination.

Using individually configurable interfaces, REA can import data from third-party systems and process it further with REA-specific declaration and analysis functions.

Note Note

You can use the Recycling Administration (REA) component to fulfill the legal requirements for Germany and other EU countries in the SAP system.

For more information about countries and recycling partners covered by REA, see SAP Note 1157821.

Note that alongside REA, SAP provides other standalone components that cover recycling processes, each with a different focus:

  • Environment, Health and Safety (EHS)

    The component provides functions for companies who create and dispose of waste products themselves.

  • Waste Disposal Industry (IS-U-WA)

    This component provides municipal waste disposal companies with functions that handle public waste disposal.

End of the note.

Implementation Considerations

To be able to use REA to its full extent, you have implemented the components Materials Management (MM) and Sales and Distribution (SD).

You have activated the business function REA – Recycling Administration (J_7L_REA_CORE).

You have configured the necessary settings for REA in Customizing for Sales and Distribution under Start of the navigation path Billing Next navigation step Recycling Administration End of the navigation path. The various IMG activities in Customizing for REA are listed in the sequence of the process flow.

Integration

The Recycling Administration (REA) component is integrated in the standard SAP system. It is compatible with industry solutions (such as SAP Retail) and other SAP application components (such as SAP EHS Management).

Features

  • Determination of the most price-effective recycling partner

    REA provides functions to analyze the data material (for example, condition and price analyses), which you can use to compare the performance of different recycling partners.

  • Automatic generation of forms for the selected recycling partner according to requirements regarding the data to be declared

    REA can issue the data to be declared either electronically in the form of data medium exchange (DME) or on paper as a form. For the declaration, REA first generates a document that is posted in the REA declaration system. You can then generate the required documents from this document in accordance with the requirements of the recycling partners.

  • Certified verification

    REA fulfills country-specific reporting requirements with its recycling partners. In your periodical declaration, you state the information and totals for all declared articles as a quantity flow in the period under consideration. REA enables a certified verification at the level of individual documents and items.

  • Use of the material information available in the standard SAP system

    REA can access existing master data in the standard SAP system and enhance it. This allows for optimal integration with the standard SAP functions.

  • Automatic determination of quantity flow from Sales and Distribution (SD) and Materials Management (MM)

    REA automatically obtains important information for generating the declaration from Sales and Distribution (SD) and Materials Management (MM).

  • Cost control and controlling with Sales and Distribution (SD), Materials Management (MM), Financial Accounting (FI), and Controlling (CO)

    In Financial Accounting (FI), you enter a recycling partner as a vendor. In Controlling (CO), a budget is generated for settlement with recycling partners on the basis of the data processed in REA. In Sales and Distribution (SD), you can evaluate the corresponding billing documents.

Example

An environmental authority instructs your company to generate recycling declarations for article battery A, taking into account the applicable, country-specific reporting requirements. To do this, you use the reporting process Create Declaration in REA, which combines and evaluates the data in the material master with the sales figures and the consumption data records from goods movements.

The system calculates the due amount of the product-specific environmental fee for each declaration and transfers the result to financial reporting for further processing. The system also provides other ERP processes (sales, purchasing, and accounting) with the result.