Practice Freight Order Scheduling

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

Practice freight order scheduling.
Plan drivers to freight orders.

Scheduling

Scheduling determines start and end times for a set of dates and times such as the departure and arrival of a freight order (FO), the pickup and delivery of the assigned freight units (FUs), or the coupling and uncoupling of trailers. In scheduling, the system considers multiple constraints like a predefined relative ordering among the activities of the FO as well as the pickup windows and the delivery windows of the assigned FUs. Scheduling can be triggered for one or more selected FOs and is based on your settings in the planning profile.

Freight Order Scheduling

The scheduling of FOs can be initiated in the following ways:

From the transportation cockpit using the Scheduling button
From the FO user interface using the Scheduling button
Automatically, by entering the departure date of a FO and choosing Enter on your keyboard (if the user parameter /SCMTMS/SCH_FORCE is active)

Scheduling considers the following constraints:

Time windows for loading and unloading activities for your FUs
Appointments for the FO to which your FUs are assigned
Loading and unloading durations of your FUs
Location sequence of your FO
Existing FOs on resources
Coupling and uncoupling durations
Calendar resources as well as the calendars and capacities for the loading and unloading activities of handling resources
Calendars of the involved vehicle resources for loading, unloading, transportation, coupling, and uncoupling activities

Scheduling Unplanned Requirement Documents

You can quickly generate the approximate transportation time for requirement documents without needing to plan the documents. In addition, the Gantt chart can display the stage sequence to provide a useful visual aid.

There are multiple ways to schedule an unplanned requirement document, as follows:

Applying a default route to the document
Choosing Schedule
Starting the freight unit building process

You can view the scheduling results on the Gantt chart and in the requirement document. After scheduling, the requirement document contains the transportation times for each stage (planned arrival and planned departure times) but the document is still unplanned.

Forward and Backward Scheduling

In forward scheduling, the system first defines the start and end time of the first activity to be scheduled. Afterward, the system assigns start and end times for all succeeding activities.

The following example illustrates the use of forward scheduling.

Customer A orders 50 pallets of product X and asks for a delivery date in three weeks. Currently, the capacity of your depot is 100 m³. Product X takes up 95 m³ of your depot. Therefore, you decide to move the goods out of your depot as soon as possible in order to minimize your inventory. That is why you decide to use forward scheduling.

In backward scheduling, the system first defines the start and end time of the last activity to be scheduled. Afterward, the system assigns start and end times for all preceding activities.

Customer B orders 50 pallets of product Y and asks for a delivery date in three weeks. Currently, the capacity of your depot is 100 m³. Product Y takes up 5 m³ of your depot. Therefore, you decide to stick to the delivery time window as closely as possible. That is why you decide to use backward scheduling.

Scheduling Constraints and Settings

You can use the scheduling constraints function to consider constraints for scheduling during VSR optimization. This allows VSR optimization to, for example, extend the transportation plans for long trip durations so that a driver can take his required breaks. This function only applies to vehicle resources. For example, a truck requires two days for a trip from the east coast to the west coast of the United States. However, since the driver must take breaks along the way, a longer trip duration must be scheduled.

Resource Availability

Resource availability is considered for the following resources:

Vehicle resources
Calendar resources
Handling resources

Resource Availability Considerations

Resource availability considers the following:

Factory calendar
Capacity variants
Downtimes
Existing activities assigned to the resource

Driving and Working Time Constraints

Driving time and working hours constraints are the rules that define when drivers must take a rest, such as a lunch break or a night's rest. You define them in Customizing as driving and working constraint profiles. In the capacity availability settings and the scheduling settings of your planning profile, you enable planning to take these constraints into account. Scheduling and vehicle scheduling and routing (VSR) optimization can then schedule rests in road freight orders based on these constraints. You can see the scheduled rests in the corresponding lists and hierarchies of the transportation cockpit. They are also graphically visualized in the Gantt chart. You can define several sets of constraints, that is, driving and working constraint profiles, to consider different regulations, such as EU and U.S. regulations.

Driving time and working hours constraints are the rules that define when drivers need to take a rest, such as a lunch break or a night's rest. You define them in Customizing as driving and working constraint profiles.

Scheduling Strategy

Scheduling strategies are assigned in the scheduling settings in the planning profile. The standard strategy is VSS_DEF. In the scheduling settings, you can specify the forward/backward scheduling direction and maintain coupling/uncoupling durations.

Embedded Scheduling

Since the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release, embedded scheduling is represented by the scheduling strategy VSS_EMBED. Embedded scheduling is using the new ABAP Engine and as its name suggest, the code of this engine is written in ABAP rather than C++, which is the code used for the VSS scheduler.

This is the default scheduling strategy. It doesn't require a remote communication and control framework (RCCF) call. You can indicate in the scheduling settings that the system is to take into account cost-based requested dates/times. However, this strategy doesn't take into account the scheduling constraints that you have defined in Customizing.

Explain Scheduling Results

The Explain Scheduling Result app allows you to analyze the result of a scheduling process.

Driver Management

A driver is any person who can operate vehicles and perform transportation-related tasks as a result of certain qualifications. Drivers are no longer maintained as resources but are defined as business partners. Drivers can get assigned to existing freight orders (FOs) and vehicle resources. It is also possible to create FOs to which the system assigns drivers automatically when they are created. This function is available only for road FOs and trucks.

One or more drivers can be assigned to an existing FO or to the individual transportation stages of an existing FO. In a driver team, the individual drivers take turns to drive. The person who is not driving sleeps.

A prerequisite of this process is that drivers are created as business partners with business partner role TM Labor Resource. The following are the properties of the driver:

Home location
Org unit
Validity period
Absences (for example, sickness, vacation)
Nonworking times (for example, Monday–Friday)
Offered qualifications
Last planned location and availability time

A prerequisite of this process is that drivers are created as business partners with business partner role TM Labor Resource. The properties of the driver are home location, Org unit, Validity period, Absences (for example, sickness, vacation), Nonworking times (for example, Monday to Friday), Offered qualifications, and last planned location and availability time.

In FO customizing, you can define the following settings related to drivers:

Settings can be changed in FO
Number of required drivers
Driver assignment type

In the manual planning settings, you can define default truck handling settings. This defines how the default truck of a driver is considered when assigning a driver to a FO. You can ignore the default truck or use the default truck if no other truck is assigned to the FO.

Automatic Assignment of Drivers

Automatic assignment of drivers to FOs happens if the driver assignment is requested via the FO type and the driver is assigned to the resource master data of the vehicle resource as the default driver. Other than that, manual assignment of drivers is possible in the transportation cockpit as follows:

Drag and Drop: It is possible to drag and drop drivers from the list of drivers in the transportation cockpit to the FO being planned in the road FO hierarchy or in the road FO list. If it has been specified in the FO type that drivers have to be assigned per transportation stage, it is possible to drag and drop drivers in the road FO hierarchy to the individual transportation stages.
Manual creation and change: It is possible to enter or change drivers manually in the Driver column in the road FO hierarchy or in the road FO list. If specified in the FO type that drivers have to be assigned per transportation stage, it is possible to enter or change drivers for individual transportation stages in the Driver column in the road FO hierarchy. If driver assignment has been activated in the order details area in the layout for the transportation cockpit, it is possible to select a FO in the road FO hierarchy or in the road FO list and manually enter or change a driver in the details for this FO.
Dialog box: Finally, it is possible to select a FO in the road FO hierarchy or in the road FO list and choose the Assign Driver push button. A dialog box appears in which drivers can be entered. Then, the user can decide in the dialog box whether to replace the currently assigned drivers with new drivers or whether to add drivers to the existing drivers.

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