Transportation management

-
  • Container Logistics
  • Organization units
  • Control parameters
  • Transportation planning and shipment completion
    • Automatic Leg Determination
  • Shipment costs calculation
    • Shipment costs settlement
    • Shipment costs calculation for individual customers
  • Billing of customer freight
  • Service agent selection
  • Management of means of transport and utilities
  • Follow-up and supervision of shipments
  • Management of shipment costs
  • Cross functions
  • Billing the Shipment Costs to the Customer
  • Simulate shipment costs in the sales document 
  • S/4HANA

Container Logistics


A shipping container is a container with strength suitable to withstand shipment, storage, and handling.  There are two types of container packing, Full Container Load (FCL) and Less-than-container Load (LCL), or break bulk shipments. For those looking to import a small quantity of goods that might not require a full container’s worth of stock, it might be worth considering a Less-than-container load shipment, where a shipping broker or freight forwarder combines your supplier’s goods with others in order to make a full shipment.

The shipment of goods and responsibilities are clearly defined by incoterms.

The two most important forms of documentation for shipping (and often quotes given by a freight forwarder) are the Bill of Lading (essentially the shipping contract), and the Freight Bill (the invoice for the cost of shipping the goods from A to B).

Process overview
  • A company has a contract with a factory for a material. The factory is located far away from the company ( in a position of a customer ). Therefore it needs to find a freight forwarder who is capable to delivery it with insurance, low cost and at the low risk.
    • The general tasks of forwarder/NVOCC are booking cargo, organizing cargo movement, negotiating contract rates with various carriers, consultation, preparation and processing of the relevant shipment documents. 
    • NVOCC also takes responsibility to organize shipments as well as to sign contracts with the shipping line and carrier ensuring that a specific number of containers can be shipped.
  • When it is selected, the freight forwarder become in charge of planning the entire process from container pickup to delivery.
    • SOC Container (Shipper Owned Container) or a COC Container (Carrier Owned Container)
  • Document preparation
    • Commercial invoice
    • Certificate of Origin confirms the country of origin of the freight
    • Bill of Lading  as a contract of carriage between the shipper and the carrier
    • Export license
    • Export Packing List ( products and packaging contained in each shipment )
    • Shipper’s Export Declaration
    • nspection Certificate
  • Containers finally arrive at the port
  • Documents are checked and the container is unloaded 
  • The container is picked it up 
  • The container is delivered to a distribution center
 
A container is a shipment document ( mesage type SHPMNT ) in SAP ERP. 

SAP Global Trade Services has comprehensive functions include export, import, customs procedures, free trade agreements, restitution, International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Excise Movement and Control System (EMCS), and sanctioned-party list screening.

Organization units

Transportation Planning Point - a group of employees responsible for organizing transportation activities and it is assigned to a company code ( necessary for shipment costing and settlement ).

Control parameters

Shipment Types
  • Individual shipment
    • One or more deliveries
    • One point of departure
    • One destination
    • One mode of transport
  • Collective shipment
    • One or more deliveries
    • Several points of departure
    • Several destinations
    • One mode of transport 
  • Transportation chain (deliveries that will be transported using multiple modes of transportation).
Shipment document data

Transportation planning and shipment completion

Automatic Leg Determination

Automatic leg determination creates legs using simple rules that determine the point of departure and destination.

The system calculates the shipment legs based on the leg determination indicator for the shipment document type.
  • Category 1: According to the Itinerary
    • Leg determination category 1 generates a sequence of locations that links together the departure points and destinations for the deliveries without gaps.
  • Category 2: Preliminary/Subsequent Leg for Point of Departure/Destination
  • Category 3: Preliminary and Subsequent Leg for Each Delivery
  • Category 4: With Shipping Type for Preliminary Leg and Subsequent Leg
    • The preliminary leg shipping type and the subsequent leg shipping type (that you can maintain in the shipment header) are taken into account.

If the standard leg determination does not meet your needs, you can activate a customer enhancement (enhancement ‘V56SLDET’).

Shipment costs calculation

Shipment costs settlement

Calculation of shipment costs is carried out using the condition technique in SAP pricing.

Functions
  • Pricing
    • Pricing procedure determination with the data sources: Delivery/Delivery item/Handling unit/Shipment cost item.
    • Determination of the pricing date and the settlement date
    • Tax Determination (tax country of departure and destination)
      • Cost releavance level: Shipment header or to a shipment stage and whether the stage includes a load transfer or border crossing point
  • Determination of Geographical Influencing Factors
    • Distances
    • Locations and zones
The shipment cost document (an object in which the shipment cost-related data are combined) consists of the following parts:
  • Shipment cost header
  • Shipment cost items ( items refer either to a shipment header or a shipment stage)
  • Shipment cost sub-items (costs)
Prerequisites
  • The shipment must be marked as relevant for shipment costing (SM30: V_TVTK_VFK)
  • The shipment must have the required total status asset in the definition of the shipment cost type (SM30: V_TVTF)
  • The shipment must have a transportation status of at least Planned
  • The shipment must have a service agent (role SP Forwarding agent)
  • Customizing for shipment cost pricing must be set
  • Condition records must be maintained.

Process flow
  1. The system determines a pricing procedure for the shipment cost item (for example, a shipment stage) using transportation planning point, service agent, shipment cost item category and shipping type as criteria.
  2. The system determines the shipment costing calculation basis for the individual condition types in the pricing procedure. This controls whether costing is carried out per container, for example, or per delivery item (the shipment cost sub-items).
  3. The system then searches for a valid condition record in the pricing procedure for the first condition type.
  4. The priority of the criteria the system uses to search for condition records is determined by the access sequence. 
  5. The system can use the information stored in the condition record to determine values such as the basic freight.
  6. The system searches for the second and then the third condition record until values have been determined for all condition types in the pricing procedure.
  7. The values of the individual condition types are cumulated as specified by the pricing procedure. The final amount calculated is copied to the shipment cost sub-item.

Programs and transactions
  • RV56TRGN
  • RV56TRSL

Shipment costs calculation for individual customers

Billing of customer freight
Service agent selection
Management of means of transport and utilities
Follow-up and supervision of shipments
Management of shipment costs

Cross functions

Billing the Shipment Costs to the Customer

Simulate shipment costs in sales document 

What are the prerequisites? 
  • The shipment cost profile is assigned to a sales document type.
  • Create condition types of the same name in the pricing procedure for shipment cost calculation (as statistical values) and in the pricing procedure (marked manually) for billing price determination (the indicator Specific procedure must be selected).  
  • Specify the price source "shipment costs" at the item level for copying control for billing documents (Delivery document to billing document , and specify the price source F for shipment costs). 

S/4HANA

S/4HANA 1709 introduced an additional deployment option for SAP Transportation Management where TM functionality runs on the same S/4HANA instance as the ERP functionality.
So now we have a choice between two types of license are available:
  • Basic shipping (LE-TRA + the certain function of SAP TM)
  • Professional shipping 
A short comparison of these two licenses: 

 Professional / Advanced Transportation

 Basic Shipping

  • Shipping and freight-forwarding industries
  • Holistic End-to-End Transportation Management
  • Early planning based on orders
  • Plan combined inbound and outbound deliveries / orders
  • Optimized transportation planning
  • Advanced Tendering
  • Advanced charge calculation and freight settlement
  • Support real-time, data driven decision making with CDS-based analytics
  • Strategic freight Management

  • Shipping industries only
  • Create, plan and monitor (without Event Management) freight orders
  • Delivery-based planning
  • Create freight orders with grouped inbound or outbound deliveries
  • Manual and rule-based planning
  • Basic charge calculation and freight settlement

You can find Help Documentation for S/4 Embedded TM (Professional Shipping):

https://help.sap.com/viewer/e3dc5400c1cc41d1bc0ae0e7fd9aa5a2/1709%20002/en-US/3dbac2009df0459da845e03e6802817f.html

For Best Practices and guides:

SAP Note 2535942 - SAP Best Practices for Transportation Management in S/4 HANA 1709 on premise
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/static.wm3.se/sites/572/media/403386_Energy_-_SBN_Energy_Day_2020_Trond_Rovang_-_Digital__Logistics_and_Logistics_Business_Network.pdf?1583415140

Comments

Post a Comment