SAP TM(Transportation Management) Freight Order Details

Freight order will show different tabs like general data , overview , stages, subcontracting and many more and details of all he tabs explained below-

General Data-

It will show what is source location and destination location and what is departure date time arrival date time once these updated these will be updated in fright unit as well showing what is loading date at source location and destination location.

Carrier- Will have carrier details.

Organizational units- Since this is legal document between us and carrier so the legal entities need to shown up here and some dependency on purchasing because carrying out this activities planners are acting as purchasing groups or buyers

Business partners- will tell you about who is my consigner and consignee and who is the carrier carrying out this activities.

Items- It will give you an overview about which items we are moving from source to destination location what is their weight, volume, UOM, reference documents.

Overview- This is another very good feature of SAP TM here we can see almost everything of the freight order here we will have graphical as well as hierarchical view where we can see that all loading activities and their specified dates and what is planned what is status of loads how it is done what is duration and time for that and we can see all those details here with respect to freight order.

In short we can see what is planned and what actual status of freight order is.

Stages- where we can see actual stage of freight order. The freight order is directly going from source to destination location or it is taking any stoppages at some transshipment points or at other supplier location and picking some material and doing deliveries. Here distance and duration per stage maintained.

Utilization– This is the feature of freight order where resource utilization will be shown per stages and will be very helpful for planning of resource and utilizing it to maximum and this gives better idea what needs to be done.

Subcontracting- This is very important tab in freight order and will show tendering, carrier ranking and continuous move documents. It will have freight agreement assignment and used for charge calculation.

Tendering- There are two type of tendering.

Peer to peer- In this type of tendering where we approach to the carriers individually because we already have freight agreements with them and we are asking carrier whether he will perform the activity or not and if he says no then we again approach to different carrier having agreement for that transportation lane.

Broadcast tendering- In this type of tendering we are publishing the transportation requirement saying that I want to move from point A to point B and have this much of volume and weight and which needs to move. Broadcast tendering is generally done when we don’t have price or don’t have fixed carrier for the lane so we are checking with multiple carriers and chose carrier who will reply earliest or who will give better rate.

Collaboration portal-

It is the portal where tendering activities carried out from earlier in SAP.

It is web based portal for our carriers to work on tender they can participate and raise invoices and dispute the things. It is not much good and not having multi functionality. It was given to carriers who don’t have EDI functionality.

Tendering has time limit and hence validity period set in tendering profile settings.

Carrier ranking- If freight agreement is present then only there will e carrier ranking and the ranking will be shown on the basis of their charges and accordingly system chooses the carrier.

In this concept, business share concept comes up business share applicable for specific period like one year or more and it means we anticipate looking to the historical data that his year there will be some ‘X’ amount business will happen or more that for that particular transportation lane so we identify some carriers for that lane and we tell them that this year we will give some ‘X’ amount of business and ask for better rate. Carrier also agrees for the same because assured business but we can’t rely on one carrier so we check for other carriers and give them business in percentage like 60/40 and this is called as business share.

It is important in carrier ranking because we get negotiated rate / low rate and on other hand if we get better rate from any other different carrier still we have to go with business share carriers so business share will have great impact on carrier selection as system will propose them.

Continuous move documents- This will show the documents for first activity, last activity, pick up location, delivery location. In this the vehicle does not come back empty and carry loads all the time , we give business to carrier again while coming back so in this case carrier will also offer some better rate.

Document flow – This will show preceding and successor documents.

Charges- We can see different charges which calculated per carrier and based on that the cost will show different dates will show.

Execution- This is the event management integration with TM we can see all events with actual time stamp for tracking the freight order.

We can have event based charges useful for ocean scenario.

Notes– It is like text used for communication purpose.

Attachment - Here we can add any communication or any other document for references.

Status- Multiple statuses can be seen here like block status, lock status, lifecycle status, archiving status, fixing status, planning (load planning),subcontracting status, invoicing status, transmission to ERP status.

Blocking information- It will show if the order is blocked for any reason.

Administrative data- This will show the details about the order user ID who created the order or changed the order.

Terms and conditions- This will show incoterms and any other terms and conditions.

Output management- Freight order is legal documents and for execution purpose updates needs to be sent to S4 and EWM side and so outputs will show here

Change documents –Changes done / change logs done for the freight order can be seen in this tab.

Automatic planning-

1) Automatic planning as batch jobs can be set from transportation cockpit layout sets by clicking on option ‘start planning as background job’.

2) Automatic planning can also be one through running program for optimizer planning

Program - /SCMTMS/PLN_OPT

After entering planning profile and freight order selection profile automatic planning can be done i.e. freight orders are created automatic to reduce manual work.