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 Transportation Management

Purpose

You use this process to plan, optimize, and execute the complete transportation process between companies in a detailed manner. You execute transportation planning in SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (SAP APO) using the component Transportation Planning/Vehicle Scheduling (TP/VS) . The orders (sales orders, purchase orders, returns, or stock transport orders) and deliveries that you have created in SAP R/3 and transferred to SAP APO using SAP APO Core Interface (CIF) form the basis for planning. The result of TP/VS planning are planned shipments that you transfer to SAP R/3 after planning is complete. There you use the SAP R/3 component Logistics Execution (LE) for transportation execution.

Note Note

  • To monitor your shipments, you can connect SAP Event Management .

  • To evaluate the transportation process, you can connect SAP Business Information Warehouse(SAP BW).

End of the note.

Prerequisites

  • You have SAP APO and SAP R/3 4.6C or higher. You can use SAP R/3 4.6B after consultation with SAP.

  • You have already executed the steps described under Master Data and Settings .

Process

  1. You transfer the transaction data , that is, orders and deliveries, from SAP R/3 to SAP APO .

    Each delivery can contain only one location for picking up goods.

  2. You execute transportation planning in TP/VS . When doing this you assign the orders and deliveries to vehicle resources . The system uses this assignment to generate planned shipments automatically. When creating planned shipments the system takes various constraints into account, for example, vehicle capacities and deadlines.

    You can execute transportation planning manually or you can use the TP/VS optimizer .

  3. You check the planning situation. Interactive planning offers planning boards where you can display all planning objects (orders, resources, and planned shipments) in a graphical format. You can also continue to manually process planned shipments that the optimizer has created.

  4. You can then assign the required transportation service provider to your planned shipments. To do this you select transportation service providers , either manually or in the background.

  5. You can determine and rectify deadline differences between sales orders or deliveries and the corresponding shipments in the following ways:

    • If you plan planned shipments for sales orders , you can use backorder processing from the SAP APO component Global Availability Check (GATP) to check the deadlines for these sales orders.

    • If you plan planned shipments for deliveries , you can change delivery deadlines in SAP R/3 from within TP/VS .

  6. When you have finished planning, you release the planned shipments. Released planned shipments are fixed, that is, you can no longer change them manually. Releasing a planned shipment is a prerequisite for tendering the shipments to an external transportation service provider ( cooperative transportation planning ).

  7. If you have already assigned a transportation service provider to your planned shipments and have set up cooperative transportation planning for this transportation service provider, the system sends a tender to this transportation service provider when the planned shipments are released. The transportation service provider can accept or reject the planned shipments that have been tendered or suggest a change to the deadline.

  8. After planning has been completed, you trigger the generation of deliveries in SAP R/3 within TP/VS , either manually or in the background. As a result, deliveries are automatically generated in SAP R/3 for the orders for which planned shipments exist.

  9. You check in TP/VS either manually or in the background if deliveries have been created in SAP R/3 for all the orders for which planned shipments have been created. Only if this is the case can you transfer the planned shipments to SAP R/3 .

  10. You transfer the planned shipments to SAP R/3 either manually or in the background. The shipments are created automatically in SAP R/3 .

  11. You use the SAP R/3 component Logistics Execution (LE) for transportation execution. In the case of sales orders, this covers picking, loading, and freight cost processing, for example. Moreover, you can print shipping documents and perform dangerous goods checks where appropriate. For more information about transportation execution, see the documentation for the component Logistics Execution (LE) .