SAP EH&S - Basic Data and Tools - What it is ?

The SAP EH&S Basic Data and Tools component provides you with a flexible and efficient solution for all the modules of SAP EH&S processes. These include Product Safety, Dangerous Goods Management, Waste Management, Hazardous Substance Management, Industrial Hygiene and Safety, Occupational Health, REACh Compliance or Emission Management or Environmental Performance Measurement or Compliance for Products. The major functionalities covered under Basic Data and Tools (hereafter referred as BD&T) included i) Entering and managing the required data on substances and products, 2) managing multilingual texts as phrases, 3) generating and sending report templates and generation variants 4) Substance Information System for displaying and drill down reporting for substance information and their export into different formats and finally 4) Tools for import and exposure of substances, phrases, report templates and other master data.

1) Substance Management: It is the basis for all other EH&S functions and provides some sort of building block for other applications. This has provision of entering substances categories (which are predefined) and created custom developed or default specification types. You can change or maintain identifiers, phrases, material – substance linkages and other physic-chemical information
2) Phrase Management – It allows you to generated and create texts in standard modules in different languages for effective use in different places. Phrases are managed by something called phrase groups, phrase sets and phrase library. Using value assignments/ phrase enabled characteristics types you can link phrases to characteristics for specification management.
3) Substance Information System – Using it you can make specialized searches of the existing specification database and create export files, display in the screen or carry out other research related searches like identifying substance with a color say “red”.
4) Report templates and report generation variants – Using this function you create all the necessary templates and generation variants for creation of reports, such as MSDS, SOP etc. Using the concept of generation variants you can control something called the report generation and the way reports are generated – whether manual report requests automatically generated, languages, template to be used for reports etc.
5) Data import and Export – The import and export of master data and communication with other systems / logistics or generation servers, EH&S Experts or even EH&S OCC will be carried out by this particular module of BD&T.


Regards
sapehstrainer

How to become a SAP EH&S Consultant

Dear Friends,

I am getting now a days mails from many aspirants asking whether I provide SAP EH&S Training and will I assist them in finding a job so on. I thought of posting the below piece of information giving a overview on how to become a SAP EH&S Consultant.

1. Join a consulting company
   If you have strong Domain Expertise (and now you want to to learn SAP EH&S) Join a consulting company that do lots of SAP projects. Infosys, Wipro, YASH, EDS, CSC Deloitte, Accenture, IBM, … etc. This entry point might be easier when the market is very high and demand is very good.
   
2. Do the SAP Academy Training.
   If you are unable to join any company and no one is paying for your training or sponsoring you – then pay for it yourself. Costs is obviously a major factor for EH&S Learning it comes to around $22000/- if you want to learn all the modules. May be the same cost will be less if SAP Provides its EH&S training in India
   
3. Join a SAP client as Trainee or Support
   Join a company that are already using SAP EH&S as a Trainee or in the Support organization. This will introduce you to SAP EH&S and they may be able to send you for academy training. The tricky bit obviously is trying to persuade them to hire you. There are couple of Institutes that offer this possibility but be selective in identifying a genuine company. As I came to know couple of training institutes taking students on the pretext of providing them job but ultimately, nothing comes out of it.
   
4. Enhance you knowledge of SAP via own study
   Start collecting SAP material and notes on SAP EH&S. Have a look at SAP website and other websites (like this one). Talk to persons who are already in the EH&S field and get some training from a freelance consultant already know SAP EH&S to take you through the basics of your area and also to some extent customization and implementation tricks.
   
5. Get access to SAP
   One can get an IDES training version of SAP to play with (Michael Management or IDESACCESS (http:\\idesaccess.com) or even in Inda ). It does cost money -- so you may want to share with someone else. You would still need to get notes / training material and ideally someone that knows SAP to take you through the functionality.
   
6. SAP Support
   Check for big companies who are doing some SAP / SAP EH&S rollout in some remote spot … nobody might be willing to go there, take up such opportunity and jump at it and explore your contacts. If you can impress the HR or Project Manager – they may want to hire you. which will give you some SAP experience.
   
7. Join SAP projects as a non-SAP person
   If you are from other technologies like HR, Programming or SQL / Database or even GIS, then look for projects that might not be 100% SAP EH&S. For example linking SAP EH&S with GIS with Programming techniques for MDM / XI techniques or even dedicated software' s like Impress. You may have a skill that they require.

Now you are into SAP EH&S and from there its your own life how you want to take that forward. But always remember one point. The success for becoming a successful SAP Consultant lies in trying to achieve diverse skill sets and capabilities.

Wishing you all - all the best in your endeavors.

Thanks

sapehstrainer

SAP EH&S Related Questions and Answers ?

Dear Friends,

Here you can post your questions, so that same can be answered

Thanks

sapehstrainer

What is SAP EH&S

Dear Friends,


Those who start to learn SAP EH&S or wish to be in this field often ask what is SAP EH&S. To a general audience SAP EH&S is a module of SAP which falls under Logistics part basically dealing with industrial safety, product compliance and occupational health. If you look at the current legislative, customer, consumer or stakeholders demands they all ask whether your company is environmentally compliant, what are the dangers / hazards I am going to face if I use your product and how to safe guard my health and so on. Even government agencies are vigilant to check for any deviations in regulatory permits whether intentional or accidental. Not only for keeping with legislation you need EH&S but also to be in the business you require stringent environmental practices. The recent examples of Mettle recalling Chinese toys tainted with heavy metal or Volero paying $236 million for Clean Air or even Palm Inc Treo phones, meeting EU norms.
So with the above backdrop, you can understand that environmental consciousness, stricter legislation's, customer interest and even stakeholders are forcing a company to look for environmentally sustainable practices. Its not that companies are working without environmental consciousness before SAP EH&S coming into picture. But the way they were doing business was entirely different and the recent demand in the market leading ERP software's for optimum business and product development. I would like to divide major companies effort in trying to be environmentally compliant for four major efforts - One is to ensure that companies achieve compliance whatever Products they manufacture, Sell, (RoHS, REACh), second, It should ensure that they are environmentally compliant for Air Pollution, Measurement needs, Regulatory permits, and Waste Management (Clean Air Act, the third one is to ensure Occupational health within the enterprise (OSHA 301, OSHA 300A) and finally to ensure Global compliance and environmental sustainability for example Carbon Demand Management or ensuring carbon foot print in all that they procure or sell in supply chain.

In order to tackle the above different requirements SAP with its technical partner Technidata has launched their first SAP EHS product for PRODUCT SAFETY Solution in the year 1997 soon they started developing other products and today SAP EH&S is a major business offering covering wider spectrum of products. Even AMR Research, a leading market analysis firm has rightly quoted " SAP is currently the only ERP provider with a significant EH&S capability, and the other solution providers do not have this level of EH&S depth on their roadmaps". Today SAP EH&S covers the following solution components i) Basic Data and Tools (Technidata prefers to name it as Basic Services and Tools and it provides training under the name of EH&S Essential and Services) ii) Product Safety iii) Dangerous Goods Management iv) Hazardous Substance Management v) Waste Management vi) Industrial Hygiene and Safety vii) Occupational Health viii) SAP REACH x) SAP EC Environmental Compliance and Emissions Management and xi) Technidata CfP endorsed business solution for RoHS.

So using the above modules SAP EH&S provides support to tackle various legislation's such as ROHS, REACH, WEEE, Dangerous Goods Transport guidelines, Clean Air Act, RCRA, SARA, CERCLA, Kyoto Protocol, OSHA and Directive 89/655/EEC.

In my next write up, I will explain some commonly used terms and overview of functionalities covered under each sub module of SAP EH&S.

Thanks

sapehstrainer

Missing Value assignments under property tree

Q; The Property Density refers to Class SAP_EHS_1013_005

This class has following characteristics if I see it under CL03

SAP_EHS_1013_005_PREC
SAP_EHS_1013_005 _VALUE
SAP_EHS_1013_005_EC_TEMP_PREC
SAP_EHS_1013_005_EC_TEMP
SAP_EHS_1013_005_PRESSURE_PREC
SAP_EHS_1013_005_EC_PRESSURE
SAP_EHS_1013_005_METHOD
SAP_EHS_1013_005_GLP
SAP_EHS_1013_005_REMARK

When I go to IMG under SET UP TABLE BASED VALUE ASSIGNMENT is completely blank in my ECC version, the characteristics are not loaded. If I continue manually loading these characteristics in table it will take days as there would be countless characteristics for all properties.......under property tree provided by SAP.

What am I missing. Does Standard Table comes BLANK

Ans:

What I understood by your question is that under the property tree you are seeing the Value assignment node but actually when you try to access the value assignments it is not showing as these are not yet set up under Specify value assignments under specification database structure.

You can either create individual values manually or create them automatically. You go to table based value assignments and execute without entering any information under the options, then system will create values for the class with node properties.

Before doing that adopt standard Specification Database using from reference client 000 using " Adopt Standard specification database"

Thanks

sapehstrainer

Specification Vs Substance

Dear Friends,

This is one of questions asked by a abaper in SDN, I thought of posting this here for everyone's convenience

Specification is a description that uses identifiers, value assignment types and header information showing the physical chemical properties, dangerous goods classifications, medical data, who created and when created, and also NAM, NUM, FRM identifiers so that you can retrieve them during search. In EHS there are different types of Specifications - based on the type of information you enter for each of them. It could be Substance Specification, Agents Specifications, Packaging Specification or even Dangerous Goods Classification specifications.

In order to create all these substances there is one workbench called Specification Workbench. Coming to the option of Transaction Code CG02, in EHS though specification workbench is a common area for creating a Specification, If you creating different specification types (Substance, Agents, Dangerous Goods classification, Waste Codes) you can directly access those selected workbench using dedicated T codes. Like CG02BD for accessing all the specification workbench, CG02 for Substances workbench, CBIH92 for Accessing Agents Specification like that.

Hypothetically assume that you have different material types if you want to choose one material type you have an option of selecting one T CODE and for another Material type choosing another TCode. similar concept applies here.

Regards

sapehstrainer

How to create additonal tab page under CBIH02

Dear Friends,

In case of SAP EHS Industrial Hygiene and Safety, you can create additional tab pages based on value assignments. Here goes how you can create one if you are interested to one.

1. Go to Transaction Cl02 and create a class with a name say “ZOther damages”. Assign class type 100 and description accordingly.
2. Save the Class
3. Go to characteristics creation T Code (CT04) and create two new characteristics called say ZEquipments and ZReactors
4. Enter characteristic type phrase enabled if you wish to include phrase enabled characteristic
5. Go to values and other values and assign function modules “C14K_PHRASECHARACT_CHECK “
6. Make settings accordingly if you want to create single instance or multiple instances
7. And save similarly create for other characteristic namely say “ZAsset Losses”
8. And create similarly as you created above for “ZEquipments”
9. Now assign these two characteristics to the class which you have created previously
10. Now navigate to Industrial Hygiene and Safety node of the SPRO and navigate to Basic settings node
11. And assign the value assignment you have created above under “Assign Value Assignment Types to classes”
12. Under Value Assignment type select the name of the you created above and give description to convey the tab pages
13. Assign the Value Assignment Category as IHS
14. Under the class assign the class you have created previously
15. Save and come out of the node
16. Under Object type assignment enter the object where you want to display the value assignment say Workarea
17. Now go to CBIH02
18. You can find the tab page under Industrial Hygiene and Safety information page as additional tab called Other Damages with “ZEQUIPMENT” and “ZASSETLOSSES”

Training Courses - Current Market requirements

Dear Friends,

I am listing a partial list of the major subjects required and brief overview of topic underneath each topic for a consultant to deliver to market requirements.

WWI Template Creation and (M)SDS Authoring

Dear Friends,

Material Safety Data Sheet authoring is one of very important tasks in SAP EHS Product Safety. Whether it is called SDS or MSDS, based USA / Germany, the overall contents remains more or less same. Before you can plan to create a material safety data sheet, you need to idenfiy your goals, expectations and how you want the template to be created and which information is to be included so on. There are quite a number of interesting data loading tools are available to load information such as Regulatory Content, Dangerous Goods Content, Phrases. Besides these standard data's even Expert Rules are also available for creating a MSDS. It is challenging to create a single template suiting to various country requirements and giving different validity areas, its always easier to create template for different countries, instead of using the same template with different output options. The common practices and ANSI standards states that there should be 16 in an MSDS covering all the aspects of a chemical right from company information to Hazard communication, first aid measures, accidental release measures so on. The following are the business standards identified - i) Use service providers for contents ( which will ease the burden of identifying regulatory information) ii) Have a dedicated regulatory expert for meeting the compliance requirements iii) Follow automated rule based MSDS authoring instead of entering the data manually iv) Develop inhouse resources for creating templates or authoring templates, it will give you good returns in the long run and finally v) its always good to streamline and document your template creation process and stick to it.

WWI or Windows Wordprocess Integration, as called is used for generating a Material Safety Data Sheet in SAP. Using the wordprocesser and Dispatcher technique, the system communicates with SAP using RFC technology. In order to use WWI for template creation, it requires training and practice. Whenever an SAP EHS consultant going for implementation or into support, it is wise to perfect in WWI Template Creation and writing simple Expert Rules, which will ease the burden.

This is some of the standard requirements from WWI / EHS Expert point of view -

i) Implementation and Customization of WWI Server
ii) Managing and monitoring WWI Server / Expert Servers
iii) Template creation using WWI
iv) Template corrections and error tracking
v) Establish and set up EHS Expert Server and Rule Editor
vi) Using the Rules for derving secondary data
and Finally vii) Get overview of existing thirdparty tools which can support you in creating a industry standard MSDS.

Regards

sapehstrainer

SAP PRESS BOOK ON EHS Will it Cover these details .... ?

Dear Friends,

Just a couple of days I have seen that SAP is going to release a book on "Implementing SAP Environment, Health and Safety", supposed to be released latter part of the year. Looking at the contents of the book, I sook realized that it definately help those who are already in the field of SAP EHS. It showed to be a consice collection of business processes, tools and Processes required for HSEQ implementation. But to be really useful for those in EHS field and those hoping to be in the field - require some of the following topics. i) Business Processes of EHS as carried out in an industry ( Functional Perspective) ii) Need for ERP software tools for managing business processes iii) Existing Software vendors and how SAP EHS is placed as far as marketability and support is concenrned iv) The Functionalities SAP EHS is going to cover v) The Current and Future landscape of SAP EHS and how it is proposed to be released in coming years vi) The different modules and their dependencies vii) Out of box functionalities of the module viii) Indepth description of their of each sub modules like Basic Data and Tools, Product Safety, Hazardous Substance Management, Dangerous Goods management, Industrial Hygiene and Safety and Occupational health and Waste management, REACh Compliance, Emission management and Other Advanced topics like EP capabilities of EHS ix) Overview of number of implementations taken worldwide and number of sub modules which are implemented and type of business scenarios implemented x) Implementation suggestions and Best Practices xi) Bench marking studies of EHS and their outcome.
It would be interesting to see the book in the coming months and definitely I would love to review it and come out with some comments

Here's the links for the book -

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Markus%20Noertemann

http://www.sap-press.com/downloads/sap_press_catalog_2009_summer.pdf

Here's another interesting book On Environmental Compliance

http://www.amazon.com/Efficient-eReporting-SAP-Implementation-Guidelines/dp/3528057610


Thanks

SAP Standard Training in EHS

A SAP EHS Business Consultant with a leading IT Firm quotes ""For learning the SAP EHS I have spent good amount of money- and learned in all the modules of SAP EHS - Basic Data and Tools, Product Safety, Waste Management, Substance Volume Tracking, Industrial Hygiene and Safety. When I learned SAP EHS, from the market leader Technidata, USA, I always was in impresssion that- LEARNING FROM THE LEADERS" will fetch me good job and demand in the market. But it never happened so. Every company who is trying to recruit never bothered to see whether the person is trained at SAP Authorized training centre or not. Even they do not think its a requirement for job", It always surprises me when they ask for how many years of implementation experience and so on"

The reason for not seeking SAP Authorized trained candidates could be because of non availability of resources who trained from recognized training centers or it could even be recruiters not aware of such trainings or even non availability of SAP EHS Authorized Training Centers in India. Though Bangalore SAP Training Center has SAP EHS, but they rarely teach that as Cost per modules is prohibitively high.

The very attitude of the recruiters and Companies is a boon for all the aspirants who wish to learn SAP EHS. You can learn SAP EHS without bothering, you should go for SAP Authorized Training Centre and put your candidature for the positions they are advertising. The major areas where a company interested in taking a person include - i) Product Safety ii) Dangerous Goods Management iii) WWI Template Creation iii) Substance Volume Tracking. Which I belive suits to those who are already in the SAP, like SAP S&D consultants or even SAP MM consultants. Its not a surpise, when I find SAP stating i) Processes in Sales and Distribution, ii) Shipping and iii) Transportation are pre-requisite for becoming a successful consultant in SAP EHS Product Safety and Dangerous Goods Management.

So Dear Friends, I suggest you to take this area and slowly start your career in this area and by the time you practice and learn it, market definately booms up and you find yourself in demanding position.

Regards
sapehstrainer