Scheduling

Purpose

The scheduling process helps you to plan your shipments and involves the following activities:

Group underlying documents including deliveries, shipping notifications and reservations into shipments
Assign shipments to an appropriate vehicle, transport unit, and compartment
Assign a driver to the vehicle (optional)
Change the quantities of product to be shipped
Plan transport-related activities using the event handling function

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text.

Prerequisites

The process of scheduling a shipment requires a vehicle and an underlying document, such as a delivery, shipping notification, or reservation. When you assign underlying documents and vehicles to shipments, the system performs the following checks:

Equal Assignment:

When you create multiple shipments with identical vehicles, driver, shifts, and trips, depending on the settings made in Customizing, the system carries out one of the following checks:

Whether the scheduling date is identical for all shipments. For the system to carry out this check, you must set the Equal Assignment indicator in Customizing for the Industry Solution Oil & Gas (Downstream) . You make this setting by choosing TD (Transportation and Distribution) TPI (Transportation Planning Interface) Logical TPS (transportation planning point) Maintain attributes of logical TPS or by choosing TD (Transportation and Distribution) TD Bulk Shipment Shipment Planning Workbench Maintain Attributes for Transportation Planning Point .
Whether the loading date is identical for all shipments. For the system to carry out this check, the Equal Assignment indicator must not be set.

In both cases, the system displays an error message. In Customizing for the Industry Solution Oil & Gas (Downstream) , you can define whether this message is a warning message, an information message, or is switched off. To make this setting, choose TD (Transportation and Distribution) TPI (Transportation Planning Interface) Configure Message Handling .

Checks during the assignment of deliveries:

Delivery must be at least relevant for discharge
Delivery is not already assigned to another shipment
Delivery has not been picked or packed
Plant must be assigned to each delivery item
The valuation type of products must be compatible with the TD intransit posting group. You can not change the valuation type if it was assigned when the sales order was created.
Bill of Material:
At least one sub-item must have the same unit of measure (UoM) group as the main item
At least one sub-item must be maintained in the same stock-keeping UoM as the main item
Plant-to-plant two-step transfer:
All main items must have the same document category
Weight and volume UoMs can be converted to the shipment UoM

Checks during the assignment of shipping notifications:

Shipping notification must be at least relevant for loading
Shipping notification is not already assigned to another shipment

Checks during the assignment of reservations:

Reservation must be a transfer reservation (no reverse reservations)
No final issue has taken place
An allowed movement type (301 or 311) is assigned at the item level
Quantities must be changeable
Item is not set to "deleted"
The valuation type of products must be compatible with the TD intransit posting group. You can not change the valuation type if it was assigned when the sales order was created.

ProcessFlow

To create a shipment you define the:

Transportation planning point for the shipment
Bulk Shipment Type
Planned date for the shipment start
Planned date for to start the loading procedure

You assign a vehicle to the shipment during Vehicle Assigment , and a driver shift to the shipment. You can assign a service agent to carry out the shipment, and you can also choose the route.

You assign a driver to the vehicle(s).

You assign the underlying documents (deliveries, shipping notifications or reservations) to the shipment in the Document Overview during Document Assignment .

You assign the individual shipment items to the compartments of the vehicle.

You save the shipment planning data.

You can optionally schedule additional transportation-related activities using Events Handling .

If necessary, you check the planning data for the compartments, and confirm the shipment. The shipment is now available for loading.

Result

The scheduling process results in one or more shipment documents. Each shipment document is assigned a number and forms the basis for loading and delivery confirmation.

The Confirm Shipment function in Scheduling saves all of the data created during the scheduling transaction and checks to make sure that product has been assigned to at least one compartment of the vehicle. When the shipment is confirmed, it receives a shipment status of 2. When the shipment has this status, it is ready for loading. At this point the shipment can still be changed.

Following confirmation of a shipment, the loading document can be printed. The schedule that has been created is only a proposal for the loading process and can be changed, for example, if it is discovered that there is not enough product. An important result of the scheduling process is that the underlying documents assigned to a shipment are blocked so that they cannot be simultaneously assigned to other shipments.

Procedure:

Creating a Shipment