The cooperation between the shipper and the forwarding agent can have synergic effects that save both partners time and money. Particularly in business relationships where a forwarding agent works primarily for a particular shipper, there can be many advantages to having joint transportation planning. The forwarding agent takes over planning functions in cooperation with the shipper, and thus simplifies the transportation planning for the shipper.

In the standard business setting, the transportation planner selects deliveries for the respective shipment while he is creating the shipments.

If there is cooperation between the shipper and the forwarding agents, parts of this transportation planning process can be outsourced.

The shipper selects a record from the shipments to be transported and sends this to the forwarding agent. There the deliveries are combined into shipments. Grouping and changing of shipments occur at the forwarding agent’s system site. The shipments that are created are reported back to the shipper.

The communication between the shipper and the forwarding agent takes place through IDocs. The forwarding agent receives an IDoc from the shipper with deliveries scheduled for planning, and then transmits the planned or rejected shipments and changes back to the shipper per IDoc.

In the following sections, we describe the settings that are required for communication with forwarding agents.