The capability to track and trace items accurately in a timely manner is becoming a critical requirement for many industries. This may be required whenever there is, for example, a quality alert and medicines or a particular model of a car need to be recalled by the manufacturer. In this case, the manufacturer must identify the location and status of all affected batches accurately and quickly so that the recall process can be started without any delay.

Before a report can be prepared for a batch or a handling unit, forward or backward genealogy (a bottom-up or top-down where-used list) of the batch or serial number needs to be found out to detect the other batches or serial numbers that are affected. Once the affected batches are found, different reports can be run on them to find their status.

One of the common challenges for companies is that the data related to batch movements often remains distributed among various systems. Sometimes, companies have multiple instances of SAP systems. Sometimes data related to batch movements is tracked partially through non-SAP systems and partially through SAP systems. To make the situation more complex, it can be a combination of all these scenarios. Therefore, it becomes a manual job to combine data from different systems and find out the genealogy. Additionally, sometimes some specific company-specific custom business process causes a gap to be created in the genealogy. It takes manual effort to bridge the gap. It also takes manual effort to combine batch data and handling units in such reports.

SAP Global Batch Traceability (GBT) can receive data from multiple SAP and non-SAP systems. While importing data from these different sources, you can apply organization-specific logic to link them. From SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), SAP GBT mainly receives three types of information:

2.    Batch where-used data: The batch where-used data is obtained from ECC by using an RFC connection. In ECC, where-used data is kept in a CHVW table. Therefore, whatever movements are captured in the CHVW table are transferred to SAP GBT. Additionally, all movements that involve storage location change or stock type change are picked from an MSEG table. All objects related to these movements, such as purchase order, material document, sales order, or delivery, also are transferred to SAP GBT through RFC connections.

Case Study of SAP GBT Implementation by a Company in the Life Science Industry

A pharmaceutical company decided to implement SAP GBT. The company had already been using an ECC system for a long time. It had the requirement of producing traceability reports for two purposes:

For an issue batch, the company had an objective of accounting for the whole quantity of the issue batch. Therefore, a batch might be:

Figure 1

A batch split scenario for stock transfer

Figure 2

Creation of an event tie for a batch split scenario

Figure 3

Account assigned subcontracting order

Therefore, an additional event linking the CO production order and the stock relevant batch was created. BAdI /GBT/EX_IL_EVENT_ENHANCE was used to develop this enhancement. This process is diagrammed in Figure 4.

Figure 4

Additional link for account assigned subcontracting order

Rajesh Ray

Rajesh Ray currently leads the SAP SCM product area at IBM Global Business Services. He has worked with SAP SE and SAP India prior to joining IBM. He is the author of two books on ERP and retail supply chain published by McGraw-Hill, and has contributed more than 52 articles in 16 international journals. Rajesh is a frequent speaker at different SCM forums and is an honorary member of the CII Logistics Council, APICS India chapter and the SCOR Society. 

You may contact the author at rajesray@in.ibm.com.

If you have comments about this article or publication, or would like to submit an article idea, please contact the editor.

Madan M. Dey

Madan M Dey is a senior SAP QM consultant and an expert in SAP GBT. He has experience working on projects from diverse industries. He has worked with PwC India prior to joining IBM India. He has implemented SAP GBT for leading pharmaceutical companies.

You may contact the author at madandey@in.ibm.com.

If you have comments about this article or publication, or would like to submit an article idea, please contact the editor.