SAP Architect Matthew Montano continues his series on the Vortex Consulting blog:

“Can you figure out why all these EDI 214 Transportation Carrier Status messages were failing?” I was asked almost 20 years ago.

The EDI message was failing a validation in SAP because the carrier was indicating they were arriving before they left. But the EDI message contents seemed correct and the carrier was creditable and clearly not trying anything of disrepute.

This was a rabbit hole. And I like rabbit holes.

In the real world there was a delivery to an address which should have taken about 40 minutes of driving time. The truck was known to have left at 9:50 local time and the carrier claimed they arrived at 9:30 local time. What? How can you arrive before you leave? I know my client was hiring very punctual carriers, but that might be too good.

Anyone who lives near a time zone boundary or has experience flying internationally knows exactly how this happens. But, in this particular scenario of a delivery entirely within the U.S. state of Tennessee, SAP’s ECC (and S/4HANA to this day!) did not know how this could happen.

Why the world uses time zones was probably something we all learned in elementary school. Some of us might remember pictures of old, complicated train schedules. Then, for many of us, back when long-distance phone calls were expensive, we learned again the importance of time zones when calling family members so as not to accidentally wake them from a slumber and ensure we were calling after 6pm for the evening discount rates.

As we aged, depending on your vintage, we entered the working world, and scheduling meetings with colleagues around the world may have involved some coordination. But even that has become mostly transparent with Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.

Then again–missing a meeting is one thing, not posting a financial document in SAP S/4HANA is another.

Time zones are used extensively, but not consistently, throughout SAP S/4HANA. While the system time zone is the SAP default used for recording date/time stamps, the explicit recording of time zones are found in Business Partner Addresses and carefully recorded in many transactions. As we discovered 20 years ago, care is required when working with time zones in SAP, especially when recording and validating crucial business transactions.

It may be easy to presume that time zones are firmly just in the realm of Logistics, but, in fact, they are very important in the other areas of SAP. In a global company scattered around across the world, how do you handle financial period closes? There is a definitive answer.

So what was happening to those trucks in Tennessee? SAP ECC thought Tennessee was in a single time zone–U.S. Central Time. But as anyone who lives in Tennessee (or Florida or Kentucky) knows, the state is in more than one time zone. So the carrier was reporting their departure and arrival in “local time” and SAP ECC was correctly raising an error. It didn’t know any better!

In diving further down the rabbit hole one could easily assume that SAP has the country of France, with its clear footprint at the center of Western Europe, in one time zone. But in actual fact, SAP does correctly capture that France, given the multiple French dependencies scattered around the world, is actually a part of many different time zones. (France is considered to have more time zones than any other country.)

So today, in 2024, what’s the issue and why are we talking about it? Well, SAP does actually provide the ability to configure that 13 U.S. states (and 4 Canadian provinces) are in multiple time zones. The problem? When it comes out of the box, S/4HANA doesn’t know this.

But there is more! The rabbit hole is actually much deeper. Although designated time zones and their boundaries might not change often, politicians are in control of it all. And then add another layer to the discussion by considering daylight saving time–which countries observe it, which don’t, and which have changing views on the matter. Just look at the currently proposed Sunshine Protection Act and you’ll be reminded that our use of daylight saving time could certainly change in the future. Heck, Mexico ended daylight saving time within the last two years.

SAP is built to handle all of these changes, but once again not necessarily out of the box. Care and discipline is required in ensuring your SAP system doesn’t do crazy things like arbitrarily declaring a carrier as a fraud. This is a core competency of the team at Vortex Consulting. With over 25 years of SAP experience, we’re well versed in the intricacies of optimizing SAP performance and ensuring reporting malfunctions like those around time zones are avoided. Send us a message to learn more about how we can support your business.

About the Author: Matthew Montano is a Vortex Consulting SAP architect with more than 25 years of experience in Electronic Data Interchange, Supply Chain Integration, and Third-Party Logistics. His passion for good documentation and streamlined work process has yielded measurable results for clients in the consumer packaged goods, life sciences, manufacturing, and transportation industries across both the United States and Canada. Keep checking in for his “Musings with Uncle Matthew” series on the Vortex Consulting blog.