Shipment Tendering for Service Agents Through the Internet  

Purpose

The option of offering shipments directly through the Internet provides a useful addition to the planning functions in the Transportation component. Planners can also include forwarding agents who do not have the SAP System in the decision-making process; these forwarding agents can then use their own systems to process the data.

A planner can react to the offers made by the forwarding agents and can also supervise the tendering status for his or her shipments. The planner receives tendering statistics and can also judge the service quality of a service agent.

Prerequisites

In the Implementation Guide (IMG), you can define all the basic settings that are required for transportation planning and for the status and event confirmation by forwarding agents under the path Logistics Execution ® Transportation ® Shipments ® Configuration of Transportation Processing for Forwarding Agents.

To ensure data security, you should set up a personal user master record for the SAP System for the service agent. System access can be monitored using user safety profiles and authorization objects that are assigned specially for the tendering status tasks. The service agents can then only call up those shipments that were offered personally to them.

Process Flow

  1. The shipper creates a shipment in the SAP System. Before this is listed for tendering, it must be scheduled; that is, the service agent and the stages must be defined already.
  2. The shipper offers the shipment to the service agent through the Internet (tendering).

    3. Planners can select the forwarding agents to whom they wish to offer the shipments, set the tendering status, and also specify conditions for shipment processing.

  3. The service agent has access via Internet to the shipments offered and he can accept, reject, or accept under certain conditions.
  4. The shipper sees the tendering status and receives an overview of the most important information about the shipment tendering process.

    5. The Shipment Tendering Status Monitor gives an overview of the respective tendering status for each transportation planning point. The number of shipments is listed by status. In this way, the transportation planner can react quickly to situations and also have a complete overview of the overall status of all shipments listed for tendering. You can display all shipments for which no answer has been received from the forwarding agent, although a timeframe was specified.

    For example, it is important to offer rejected shipments as soon as possible to other forwarding agents since each delay at this stage means a delay in the shipment itself.

    In addition, the planner has a type of control function for the current processing status.

  5. The shipper confirms the acceptance or rejection of the service agent and passes on further information, if required.
  6. The service agent commences with processing the shipment by defining the planned data and setting the status in the shipment.

A tendering list provides the service agent with information on newly offered shipments at all times. The service agent can use the status list to view the processing status of accepted shipments.

See also:

Tendering Shipments for Service Agents