Agreements are the basis for calculating transportation charges and can involve one or more parties.
You use forwarding agreements (FWAs) to calculate transportation charges billable to your customer, and freight agreements (FAs) to calculate transportation charges billable to you by your carrier.
You use internal agreements (IAs) to calculate transportation charges between organizations of the same company code and between organizations of different company codes in the same company.
A service agreement is a type of freight agreement, which contains only service types or service products.
Agreement Overview
Organizational Units in SAP Transportation Management (TM)
Organizational units are used to determine responsibilities, for example, for approval processes, and authorization of who is allowed to see data or perform certain actions.
In SAP Transportation Management (TM), organizational units can be divided into sales and purchasing, and planning and execution.
Forwarding houses can be used to represent business units (LSP), and perform all functions including sales, purchasing, planning, and execution.
Organizations and Business Documents
The sales side is responsible for sales and services, such as organizing the necessary activities for shipment transportation. For this reason, the sales organization is indicated in the business documents forwarding documents, order-based transportation requirements, delivery-based transport requirements, and forwarding settlement documents.
The purchasing side is responsible for procuring the necessary services from vendors (for example, carriers). For this reason, the purchasing organization is indicated in the business documents freight orders, freight bookings, service orders, and freight settlement documents (FSD).
Contractual Data in Agreements
An agreement includes contractual data, such as the following:
- Organizational unit (for example, the sales or purchasing organization)
- Involved parties (for example, the ordering party or carrier)
- Terms of payment
- Validity dates
The system determines the agreement based on organization, business partner, validity period, and preconditions. An agreement is most commonly determined by the purchasing organization and business partner (carrier for freight agreements, customer for forwarding agreements). In the Freight Agreement Type Customizing activity, you can configure whether one or multiple partners can be entered in the agreement; that is, if you have one freight agreement with a carrier valid for multiple purchasing organizations.
Also, there is the possibility of selecting agreements manually:
Therefore, the agreement determination type of the calculation profile has to be set to 'Display All Agreements' (Unit 3, Lesson 2).
Forwarding and Freight Agreement Customizing Considerations
A forwarding agreement is a long-term contract that represents the contractual relationship with a customer to whom you are selling transportation services.
A freight agreement is a long-term contract that represents the contractual relationship with a carrier from whom you are buying transportation services.
When configuring agreements, it is necessary to examine the logistical model. Purchasing organizations, business partners such as customers and carriers, as well as business rules, such as plan or actual ship date, have a direct impact on how agreements are maintained.
The standard determination rule for freight agreements uses purchasing organization and carrier; for forwarding agreements, the standard determination rules use sales organization and customer.
For complex determination rules, a BRF+ condition can be created. This allows rule-based determination based on more fields.
Customizing Agreements–Agreement Types
The allowed item types are:
- Preconditions that can be defined in the agreement, such as transportation mode or service level
- Text schema used to store freight agreement notes
- Default calculation sheet template used when creating the calculation sheet from within the agreement
- Direct shipment order scheduling type
- Display time determination type is used to specify if the time display can be editable or display only
- External delivery date determination rule if other system besides TM is used for the delivery date determination
- Multiple parties allowed
- Departure, transit, and arrival calendar
- Allocation type the system uses to create transportation allocation
- Setting to enable Change Document tab page or screen area
