As the shipment costs can make up a large proportion of the total cost of a product it is important and therefore recommended that you have a rough idea of the shipment costs when the order is created. As in normal situations no deliveries, shipments or shipment cost documents exist at this point, simulated versions of these can be "created" in the background to enable you to calculate shipment costs on the basis of these documents.

This means that you can estimate shipment costs. When you make the appropriate setting it is also possible to implement several calculations at the same time, in order, for example, to determine whether transport by lorry or by train would be cheaper or how much more it would cost to send by express delivery rather than by standard transport.

Shipment cost information is called up in SD order processing but uses the transportation and shipment cost processing functions.

Shipment cost information in the order can only be used if the control parameters and master data for transportation and shipment cost processing have been maintained.

To calculate shipment costs in the order you can define profiles for shipment cost information. The profile for shipment cost information contains default values for shipment cost information in the order, for example, the transportation planning point, transportation type and the shipment pricing procedure. The profile for shipment cost information is assigned to a sales document type (when defining the sales document types in Customizing for Sales and Distribution). If you do not want to carry out comparisons between the calculation methods, but just want to receive an estimated value for the shipment costs, then use the details from the profile for shipment cost information (transportation planning point, transport type, pricing procedure) and the data from the order (forwarding agent, route) for calculating shipment costs and the related simulated creation of transports.

To carry out a comparison of different calculation methods, you can assign one or more shipment planning profiles to a profile for shipment cost information. This planning profile is used to create shipments in collective processing, in order to store specific selection variants and data, which should always be used, in the memory. A planning profile determines how deliveries should be put together with shipments and which data should be put in the shipment documents. You can assign various planning profiles to the profile for shipment cost information, in order, for example, to compare whether it is cheaper to transport by train or by lorry. It is also possible to assign a planning profile for creating transportation chains.

If you begin the calculation of shipment costs in the sales document, the data that is used to simulate the putting together of the two types of transportation, is the data which is saved in the order and in the shipment costs profile, which is assigned to the corresponding sales document type. If the planning profile is assigned to the shipment cost type, this data is also used for the parallel calculation of shipment costs, so that it is possible to compare different transportation options.