Restricted Party Screening

[Former Member]

In this competitive world, every IT service provider strives to deliver improved software and enhance its features on regular basis.  To name few

• Rich User Interfaces
• Applications with faster responses
• Advanced Analytics
• Many more …..

All this effort is to attract more customers and increase our sales margins. It is very evident that Customers and even Vendors play a key role in every business. Now the Question is “Are we doing Business with Right Customers & Vendors?”

In an era of tight security, determining whether individuals, companies or organizations are restricted from conducting trade is essential. Exporters are responsible for ensuring that they are compliant with government regulations and that their goods are not being sold to undesirable entities. These entities are referred to as Denied, Debarred, and/or Restricted Parties, and checking your transactions against these restricted party lists is called a Restricted Party Screening (RPS) process.

Recently, we have developed a Master Data Solution for one of the World’s largest confectionery, food and beverage companies. We ensured the basic functionality as mentioned below

• mandatory fields are filled
• business validations are triggered
• routing happens through intelligent workflows
• data syndicates to downstream systems and so on

But, what we additionally improved further is related to Legal & Compliance.

• Properly conducting Party Screening is a critical and long-standing compliance expectation. Each responsible unit (Business unit, country or function) is currently required to perform RPS before conducting business with a new partner. 
• Master Data Creation is not integrated with screening and this lack of linkage creates a risk of a restricted party being inadvertently approved for business.

What we achieved?

• We proposed a solution to strengthen the controls surrounding RPS by integrating the process with SAP
• SAP is integrated with Third Party software which performs the party screening and generates unique partner Id. 
• A partner validation is built, to ensure that the partner Id was in fact screened and cleared as an “Approved” record, prior to initiating the Master Data creation process within Vendor and Customer domains
• Also there are specific regional requirements and exceptions for party screening which is controlled through work flow

Benefits to Client:

• Integration of RPS with Master Data has strengthened the Legal & Compliance controls by making it more efficient, effective, and secure.
• Instilled the discipline for Business to screen all potential business partners are legitimate entities.
• Established consistent process across all regions against compliance requirements.
• Time Saving  during master data creation as the basic data is pulled directly from RPS, thus minimizing the data entry

Key Message:

It is important to expand scope beyond technical and functional requirements and ensure we are also aligned with Legal & Compliance

About Author

• Sreeram Kasturi  is working as Senior Technology Architect with Infosys and has been executing complex SAP NetWeaver projects for major customers in  America, Europe & Asia Pacific

• He is a Techno Functional Consultant and has expertise in the areas of SAP Portal, SAP MDM, SAP GDS, SAP BPM & SAP KMC.