Comprehensive and Detailed 150 to 250 words of Explanation From Positioning SAP Business Suite via SAP Financial Management Solutions documents:
SAP Sanctioned Party Screening, a core component of SAP Global Trade Services (GTS), is designed to ensure that an organization does not conduct business with individuals, companies, or entities listed on international restricted-party lists (such as those from the UN, EU, or US OFAC). It supports compliance primarily through automatic blocking of transactions and providing efficient review workflows.
When a sales order or purchase order is created in the SAP S/4HANA system, the GTS engine instantly checks the names and addresses against current sanctioned party lists. If a potential match is found, the system automatically blocks the transaction, preventing any further actions such as shipping goods or issuing payments. This real-time intervention is critical for preventing inadvertent violations of international law.
Because screening algorithms can sometimes produce "false positives" (e.g., similar names), SAP provides efficient review workflows. These workflows route the blocked transaction to a designated compliance officer who can quickly investigate, add comments, and either release the block or confirm the violation. This ensures that compliance does not become an unnecessary bottleneck to legitimate business while maintaining a rigorous and auditable trail of all screening activities. Analyzing market trends (D) and managing inventory (B) are entirely different functional areas (Analytics and SCM) and are not related to the legal compliance functions of Sanctioned Party Screening.
