A trade lane is a classification of any transport-related activities representing a combination of zones or locations combined with a transportation mode or means of transport and providing an orientation between the source and destination.

Examples of trade lanes include:

Trade lanes are not a substitute for transportation lanes. For planning purposes transportation lanes must be maintained even if a suitable trade lane exists.

Trade lanes can form a hierarchy. This means that more generic trade lanes can contain more specific trade lanes. For example, “Within Germany Using Means of Transport Truck” contains “Along the Way from Frankfurt to Hamburg with Means of Transport Refrigerated Truck” and “Within Bavaria with Means of Transport Truck for Liquids”.

Trade lanes may overlap, for example, “From Germany Using Airplane” and “Within Europe Using Airplane”.

Trade lane hierarchies contain the following:

In previous releases, trade lanes were created from, and associated with other business objects such as Business Shares, Allocations, and Freight Agreements. You can now use trade lanes as full master data objects, creating, copying, and reusing them according to the needs of your business. You can view all available trade lanes in a worklist and, view information such as a where-used list.

You can configure the types of trade lanes that can be used to create trade lanes. For more information see Customizing for Transportation Management under  Transportation Management Master Data Transportation Network Trade Lane