The scope of transportation status activities should be reserved for administrative personnel for various reasons. For example, it could be the case that some employees only process one shipment type, that some are only responsible for transportation by land while others are responsible for transportation by sea. Still others could be responsible for organizing transportation planning and some could monitor all activities up through shipment completion. It may not make sense for someone who only works with one status activity to be authorized to execute other status activities. The system should carry out an authorization check to see if the user has the authorization to set or reset a particular transportation status. Status authorization can be an important security instrument to avoid the shipment being changed after the fact by someone with no authorization because of an accident during shipping, for example.

The SAP standard function for checking authorization is used. The new authorization object V_VTTK_TSA is used with authorization fields SHTYP for the shipment type and TRSTACT for the shipment status activities to check authorization.

When the shipment status is changed, the system checks whether the user is authorized to process the shipment type and status. If the user has this authorization in his or her user master record, processing of the status activity is allowed. Otherwise, an message appears in which the causes and further procedures appear.