Determination of Geographical Influencing Factors (SAP Library

Determination of Geographical Influencing Factors

Use

Distance and other geographical considerations play an important role when calculating shipment costs.

You can define shipment cost conditions as dependent upon these considerations. For example, when defining a condition table in Customizing, you can select fields such as departure zone, destination region, destination postal code, and so on.

You define the condition tables for shipment costing in SD Customizing: Logistics Execution ® Transportation ® Shipment Costs ® Pricing ® Pricing Control ® Define price dependencies (condition tables).

For further information on the role of the condition table in pricing, see Condition Tables.

Features

You have the following options for representing geographical considerations in the system as part of pricing:

Distances

The distance can be used as a scale basis and calculation rule during the calculation of shipment costs. The distance can be stored in the shipment header or the shipment stage header. The distance can be entered in the following ways:

- Manually

You can enter the distance manually in the shipment document

- Routes and route stages

You can maintain the distance in route definition in Customizing for both routes and route stages. When the corresponding route is used, this value is copied to the shipment document as a system proposal.

- Customer enhancement for distance determination

If you want to determine distances automatically, you can activate a customer enhancement (enhancement ‘V56DISTZ’), for user-defined distance determination.

Locations and zones

You have the following options for the origin of locations and zones that can be used to influence shipment costing. They are categorized into departure and destination-related data:

- Address data

Data such as the country, region, postal code or transportation zone that can be used as fields to define the condition tables, can be taken from the shipment address data.

- Determination of tariff zones

You can set the automatic determination of tariff zones in Customizing. A tariff zone is the combination of a postal code area for a country. The tariff zone is defined in terms of the

· Transportation planning point

· Service agents

· Shipping type

· Country

. For example, a postal code area has been assigned to a predefined tariff zone for a combination of transportation planning point, service agent, etc. If the system does not find a valid tariff zone for these criteria, it carries out determination again with an "empty" shipping type.

With the corresponding system settings, the tariff zone is determined automatically when it creates a shipment cost item. That is, when it creates a shipment cost document or when another item is created manually.

Prerequisites

If you want the system to determine distances from the route or route stage, you must maintain the distances in Customizing for route definition. You make these settings in Customizing: Sales and Distribution ® Basic Functions ® Routes ® Define Routes ® Define routes and stages.

If you want to use tariff zones for shipment costing, you must define them in Customizing and select them there for automatic determination. You make these settings in Customizing: Logistics Execution ® Transportation ® Shipment Costs ® Basic Shipping Functions ® Define and assign tariff zones.