SPL Screening Search in SAP GTS Edition for HANA: What’s new

In the world of international trade, every organization must ensure compliance with sanctions, embargoes, and export control regulations. One of the most critical processes is SPL (Sanctioned Party List) Screening — automatically checking business partners against sanctioned-party lists.

With the transition to SAP GTS Edition for HANA, SAP has introduced enhancements that significantly improve speed, accuracy, and usability in the Search for SPL Screening process.

Why is SPL Screening so important?

Any company involved in cross-border trade must ensure that it does not conduct business with entities listed on government or international sanctions lists.

Lack of compliance may cause high risk of:

• heavy financial penalties,
• cargo holds,
• reputational damage,
• loss of export privileges.

For businesses operating globally, SPL Screening is a fundamental compliance safeguard and risk-mitigation tool.

What’s New

Below, you can find what new features are available in the SPL HANA search experience.

1. Fuzzy Search

SAP HANA’s fuzzy search provides high-speed, flexible matching by returning entries despite misspellings, omitted characters, or additional characters in the search phrase.

2. In-Memory Processing

HANA stores data in-memory, the system can compare partner names and attributes against hundreds of thousands of SPL records significantly faster.

3. Enhanced Search Algorithms

The SPL Algorithm determines how names are compared between business partner data and Sanctioned Party Lists imported into GTS. HANA centralizes search logic across multiple screening processes (Business Partner Screening, Document Screening, Address Screening), improving consistency in results.

4. Name Normalization

Before comparing, SAP GTS checks both names to:

• Remove punctuation
• Remove stop words
• Convert to uppercase
• Strip special characters
• Handles transliteration (example Cyrillic → English)

Example:
Müller (entry) mueller (normalized form)

This reduces inconsistencies and improves match reliability.

5. Tokenization

Tokenization is the process of splitting text into tokens before applying normalization, fuzzy search, linguistic rules, etc.

Example:
Al Blueberry Company (entry) AL, BLUEBERRY, COMPANY (tokenization)

6. Aggregated Score

When a record contains multiple searchable fields (name, address, city, etc.), HANA calculates individual fuzzy-match scores per field and then combines them into one final Aggregated Score.

This makes screening evaluations clearer and much more reliable.

Search Parameters Explained

HANA’s SPL search provides 4 parameters for each comparison procedure:

1. Exactness – This parameter lets the screening recognize results even when there are typos, spelling differences, or accented characters. Reducing the value increases the system’s tolerance.
2. Minimum Score – The minimum score is a value from 0 to 100 that defines how closely two names or addresses must match in order to count as a valid hit.
3. Percentage Rate of Matching Words – A value from 0 to 100 that defines the minimum proportion of words in a full name or address that must match. This setting helps you adjust the trade-off between real hits and false positives. Lower values make the screening more sensitive to individual word matches.
4. Symmetric Search on – The system simultaneously evaluates the business partner’s input and the SPL record. It examines all possible word-to-word comparisons and uses the one that produces the highest similarity percentage.

HANA’s search offers:

• more accurate matches,
• fewer false positives,
• lowers manual review workload

SAP HANA Search is undoubtedly a great solution that simplifies and eliminates time-consuming, complex maintenance tasks whenever you see a change in SPL lists.

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Integration with other GTS Processes

SPL Screening in HANA is now more integrated with other GTS components:

• Compliance Management – automatic blocking of export documents
• Customs Management – with holding customs declarations in risk scenarios
• Risk Management – linking match results to partner risk assessments

This creates a single, coherent compliance ecosystem.

Summary

SPL Screening in SAP GTS on HANA is a new, quicker, and more precise way to support compliance work. With faster searches, an updated Fiori interface, improved scoring, and HANA’s power, GTS E4H is prepared for changing trade regulations.