Transportation Planning
Use
Transportation planning involves all the activities that must be performed before the shipment leaves the shipping point. These activities include:
Acquiring the services of a forwarding agent
Organizing the means of transport
Specifying the route for the shipment
Defining the stages for covering this route in the most efficient way.
There are different types of shipment document types to deal with the various forms of transportation (for example, individual shipments or collective shipments). The shipment documents are used as a basis for carrying out transportation planning. This includes, among other things, the execution of the above activities.
Prerequisites
Before you can carry out transportation planning, the following requirements must be met:
For outbound shipments
Specify in Customizing for Transportation that a delivery type for the shipping notification is relevant for transportation planning and shipment completion.
Specify a route in the deliveries.
Specify in Customizing for Transportation that the routes in the deliveries are relevant for transportation planning and shipment completion.
Make sure the ShpmtBlReason (shipment blocking reason) field is blank. You can find this field in the delivery header on the transportation screen.
Once these requirements have been met, the system automatically sets the transportation planning status to A (Not yet planned) in the Trns.plan.status field in the delivery header.
For inbound shipments
Specify in Customizing for Transportation that a delivery type for the inbound delivery is relevant for transportation planning and shipment completion.
Assign all items to the same plant in the inbound delivery. The system carries out a corresponding check.
Features
There are different types of worklists and lists you can use to perform various tasks in transportation planning:
Shipment list
You use the shipment list to establish which inbound or outbound deliveries are due for shipment. After you have created the list, you can
– Create the necessary shipment documents for particular inbound or outbound deliveries
– Specify the order in which the inbound or outbound deliveries (or shipment items) are to be delivered
Transportation planning list
When you are creating the shipment due list, you do not usually have all the information you need to complete transportation planning. For instance, you probably do not know which forwarding agent will take care of goods shipment at this stage. You could also decide not to finish the entire planning for a shipment in the shipment list because the capacity for this shipment is not yet used to the full. Once you have the information you require or once there are enough deliveries to fill the shipment, you can use the transportation-planning list to locate these documents and complete transportation planning.
This list contains shipment documents for which planning activities still have to be completed and which match selection criteria that you define. You can use the list as a basis for performing transportation planning activities, such as organizing a means of transport, scheduling loading activities and acquiring the services of forwarding agents.
Besides this "normal" transportation planning list, there are additional lists that you can use to find shipments according to certain categories. For instance, in the Utilization list, you could enter the shipment’s degree of utilization as a percent, according to weight and volume, as one of the selection criteria.
Activities
You must first determine which inbound or outbound deliveries are due for transport. A worklist for this purpose is created using selection criteria. Deliveries or outbound deliveries are then assigned automatically or manually to shipment documents. Relevant data, such as shipping points and destinations, is then used to determine the route and to break it into stages.
The route in the delivery can be used as one of the criteria for selecting deliveries due for shipment. It is not, however, copied into the shipment document. More information is available in the following sections.
You can make the appropriate settings in Customizing so that routes and service agents are copied from the deliveries into the shipment documents.
Using the Route as Selection Criterion
The route in the delivery can represent:
One or more legs
A link between the point of departure and the destination
The destination region
The route in the shipment document differs from the route in the delivery. The following examples should illustrate the difference between a route in the delivery and a route in the shipment document.
Example of a route as a link between departure and destination locations
The following graphic shows the route as a link between the point of departure and the destination.
In the delivery document, the route NA indicates that both deliveries are to be transported across the North Atlantic.
During transportation planning, you select all deliveries with the route NA and then look for a ship that can transport the deliveries at the required time. You find a ship that sails from Antwerp to New York and enter the route NA1 in the shipment document header.
Example of a route as a target area:
Routes can also be destination regions. The following graphic shows routes R5, R6, R7, and so on as destination regions.
During transportation planning, you select all deliveries with route R5. You notice that there is still room in the truck. To make use of this capacity, the deliveries with route R6 are selected as well.
