Dispute Management for Freight Settlements
As a requester of transportation services, such as a shipper, you can have one of the following freight settlement processes in place with a provider of transportation services, such as a carrier:
Self-billing
Your service provider does not submit an invoice. Instead, you settle automatically based on the information in your freight order. Self-billing is also named evaluated receipt settlement (ERS) in SAP ERP.
Submission of an invoice by the service provider
You pay the service provider the amount contained in the invoice.
In both processes, you can have differences and potential disputes between what you expect to pay against what the service provider expects to be paid. To keep good business relationships, you need to work closely with your service provider to resolve these differences in a collaborative way. You need to get clarification on what the differences are, and converge on an agreement with the service provider on how to resolve the differences.
In SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM), you can use the following settlement processes:
Self-billing
You can enable your service provider to create dispute cases against your freight orders for additional unplanned freight costs such as a detention charge or a charge for a larger dimension.
Invoice submission
You can enable your service provider to use the SAP TM collaboration portal to enter and submit invoices for the freight orders that the service provider executed. Your service provider can enter additional unplanned freight costs, or can propose changes to existing charges in your freight order when they submit an invoice. The system automatically creates a dispute case when your service provider submits an invoice that contains disputed items.
On the NWBC dispute case screens, you can approve, reject, or propose a change to a dispute case. You can navigate to freight settlement dispute cases on NWBC by choosing 
Freight Settlement
Dispute Case
Overview Freight Settlement Dispute Cases
.
If you approve a dispute case on the NWBC dispute case screens, the system updates the freight order with information for the charge type, such as rate and quantity information. However, the system does not update header information, such as gross weight, gross volume, and total distance. Instead, the system uses the updated header information when calculating charges. This is illustrated in the following examples:
Your carrier disputes the total distance in a freight order. The carrier travelled an extra 10 km, making the total distance 510 km and not 500 km as contained in the freight order. You, as the shipper, accept the proposal. The system does not update the total distance in the stages or header of the freight order. Instead the system uses the updated distance of 510 km when calculating charges.
Your carrier adds a new charge line to the freight order, claiming for an additional demurrage charge. You accept the carrier’s claim. At the rate of USD 50 per hour, this amounts to a total of USD 200 for 4 hours. The system updates the freight order with the new charge line for demurrage at USD 50 per hour, amounting to USD 200 for 4 hours.
When you resolve disputes early, you have the following business advantages:
Inclusion of changes and unplanned activities in one invoicing run
Accuracy in payment
More Information
Subject | More Information |
|---|---|
Introduction to the basic concepts of dispute management for self-billing | |
Introduction to the basic concepts of dispute management for invoice submission | |
Structure of an individual dispute case on NWBC, including working with a dispute case | |
Structure of an individual carrier invoice on NWBC, including working with a carrier invoice | |
Necessary Customizing settings required before you can use dispute management | |
Individual aspects of dispute management | |
Details of how SAP TM updates SAP ERP | |
Self-billing in SAP ERP | SAP Help Portal at http://help.sap.com/erp |
SAP TM collaboration portal |
