Shipment and Transportation Scheduling 

Purpose

The aim of the APO shipment and transportation scheduling function is to guarantee consistent automatic scheduling in shipping and transportation processes that occur in various systems. As of Release 3.0A, the SAP APO system is a central location for scheduling. The SAP APO system therefore effectively replaces local shipping and transportation scheduling functions if materials that are to have an availability check run in the SAP APO system are involved. Scheduling still takes place in the SAP R/3 System for all other materials.

Shipment scheduling

All processes that are necessary to initiate goods shipment are included in shipment scheduling. These processes include loading, picking and packing. Shipment scheduling determines the material availability date and loading start.

Transportation scheduling

All deadlines that affect shipment preparation and execution are included in transportation scheduling. These include transportation lead time, transportation time and the unloading/reloading time (for stock transfers). Transportation scheduling uses the requested delivery date to determine the goods issue deadline and the transportation planning deadline. If the system uses forward scheduling, the possible delivery date is determined.

Prerequisites

You have entered all the attributes relevant for scheduling in the master data and made the necessary settings in Customizing or used conditions so that the SAP APO system can determine these attributes. (See also Prerequisites for Scheduling.)

Process

  1. When you enter an order, you can specify a requested delivery date for each schedule line in an item. The customer should receive the goods by this date. During order processing, the system can automatically plan when the necessary shipment activities such as picking, loading and transportation must begin in order to stay on schedule for the requested delivery date.
  2. The system starts with the requested delivery date and schedules chronologically backwards. For this reason, this process is called backward scheduling. The system determines the deadlines as follows:

The planning date and the material availability date are determined based on the loading start.
  1. If the system recognizes that the material availability date or the planning date fall in the past, it automatically runs forward scheduling in order to determine a delivery date that can be confirmed.

If there is no material available on the material availability date, the SAP system can run an availability check according to the system settings. The resulting material availability date is then used as a basis for forward scheduling.

In a rules-based availability check, backward scheduling is carried out to determine the material availability date for a location/product substitution, starting from the original requested delivery date. This is necessary, since the substitution can influence the scheduling result (for example, because of another transportation lane in location determination).

The condition technique defines the type of shipment scheduling and transportation scheduling. The following elements of the condition technique are fixed and cannot be changed:

You can set access sequences and condition tables.

Example
 

Scenario description

 

Scheduling (1 R/3, 1 APO)

See also:

Creating Scheduling Steps