Pricing and Payment Events (PPE) Within Trading Contract Processing

Pricing and Payment Events functionality provides a means to add additional date-related information that can be used in pricing, invoicing, and billing to the trading contract and its successor documents. Dates can be entered as planned or actual dates that refer to a business event in the logistics process. Typical examples for such business events are title transfer, arrival, load, discharge, invoice-related dates, and payment-related dates.

SAP delivers a set of pre-defined business events within switched business configuration sets that are automatically activated via this business function.

Customers can add their own event definitions in the Customizing for Pricing and Payment Events.

Enhanced Expense Management for Agri Processes

Planned expenses on trading contract for price fixing level can be used as planned expenses on trading contract for load level if the trading contract for load is assigned to trading contracts for price fixing.

The planned cost is show automatically within expense settlement processing. Therefore, no manual steps are necessary to calculate the correct planned expenses. As a consequence, all planned process costs are shown to the user and therefore all costs can be covered easily. In addition, the profit or the margin of the business process can be influenced and tracked in a transparent way.

Multi Level Bill of Material (BOM) Explosion Within Trading Contract Application

For sales only processes, the trading contract application supports multi-level sales BOMs on contract item level. Basically, the trading contract application now provides the same functionality as the sales order with regards to BOM explosion.

The user can maintain multi-level BOM on trading contract level to fulfill customer needs.

The outbound messages of the A2A and A2X SOA services for the business object Trading Order provide the information about the exploded bill of material.

Agricultural Processes based on Trading Contract Application

New UI: A new user interface to maintain commodity items and assignments was developed for trading contracts for price fixing, trading contracts for load and for trading contracts load planning.

A new set of trading contracts is defined to support the basic Agri processes within Commodity Management.

To store the contractual information concerning pricing information a new kind of trading contract was defined the trading contract for price fixing. This document is able to store the pricing information for soft commodities. To drive the load processes two new kinds of trading contracts were developed.

The trading contract for load processing also consumes the pricing information of a trading contract for price fixing.

The trading contract for load planning is used to define the contractual data, for example, for a season or as a long term living contract and to consume the pricing information of a trading contract for price fixing. The trading contract for load planning is used to make call off’s for the load processing, which includes the transfer of the pricing information, too.

The outbound messages of the A2A and A2X SOA services for the business object Trading Order provide the information about the kind of trading contracts.

Creation and Cancellation Processes Within Trading Contract Application

Supports the automatic generation or cancellation of entire predefined business processes within one step based on trading contracts.

One aspect of this feature is automatic generation of documents to reduce human errors. Another aspect is a reduction of manual processes based on predefined process steps.

Reduce manual effort to generate or to cancel follow-on documents of a trading contract if the follow-on document processing can be done automatically based on business rules.

Create Batches Within Trading Contract Application

UI: On trading contract level, the UI has been enhanced to allow the user to jump to the batch maintenance application to define new batches out of the trading contract application.

Within the trading contract application, you can now create batches and maintain their characteristics.

On trading contract level, you can create processing batches and their characteristics that are used within the pricing application. The definition of batches on trading contract level prevents the user from making mistakes or to miss maintaining important data at contract entry.

Document Flow on Item Level for Trading Contract Processes

New UI: On item level of a trading contract as well as on item level of the follow-on documents of a trading contract, a new user interface is provided to show details of the actual item based on the JNet application process. Besides document-flow-specific data, the JNet Graphic provides the assignments network of the commodity items.

There are the following key capabilities:

Incoterms within Expense Management

Based on a new Customizing setting, Agency Business applications provide a new feature to maintain Incoterms on header and on item level of a document. If this new feature is activated for a certain expense management document type the Incoterms are copied automatically from the underlying document, for example, outbound delivery to the expense document. Furthermore, it is possible to maintain Incoterms manually if different Incoterms are foreseen for the actual expense document.

Settle Invoice Requests for Energy Business

With Contract Settlement for Energy Business, you can run an integrated commodity management scenario to trade power, gas, and similar energy products that do not require dedicated logistics follow-on processing. In addition you can utilize a third-party application optimized for front- and mid-office activities to handle contracts and related settlement data, while using Global Trade Management for contract settlement and invoicing. SOA A2A services are used for the communication between the applications within a company.

Streamlined contract settlement of invoice request in energy business without the need for dedicated logistics follow-on processing.

Application Log for Trading Contract Release Processing

A new application log on trading contract header level will provide the capability to analyze the cause of a release error. The application log is stored on the database and contains the messages of the release process.