Selection and Planning Profiles

Freight units (FUs) are selected based on the dates and times that they were originally scheduled to be picked up (loading start) and delivered.

Within each section, you define an inclusive or exclusive set of location values that determine which FUs are relevant for planning. Each section allows users to define specific values or ranges of values. Using these parameters of greater than, less than or not equal to users are able to define precise criteria for planning.

Selection profiles are used to select documents/objects (FUs, freight orders (FOs), freight bookings, and transportation units). The selection profile is a user-specific grouping of business documents that is considered during transportation planning. The system takes into account the selection profile created during interactive planning, VSR optimization, and carrier selection.

In the selection profile and in the assigned selection attributes, you define which business documents the system is to take into account, as well as the maximum number of documents. You can assign the following selection attributes to a selection profile:

• Time-related selection attributes in which you define the demand Horizon.

• Geographical selection attributes in which you define source and destination locations or zones.

• Additional selection attributes in which you define more attributes for database queries.

Geographical Selection Attributes: In a company’s planning department, geography is often used as a way to allocate planning responsibility. For example, an individual or team can be responsible for a specific plant, distribution center, or group of customers in a geographical area. The geographical selection attributes in the selection profile allow the team to limit their view in such a way that they only see FUs or FOs for which they have responsibility.

The geographical profile distinguishes which source and destination locations are relevant for FU selection. The geographical profile is split into four sections:

• Source Locations
• Source Transportation Zones
• Destination Locations
• Destination Transportation Zones

Within each section, you define an inclusive or exclusive set of location values that determine which FUs are relevant for planning. Each section allows users to define specific values or ranges of values, using the logical greater than, less than, or not equal to, to provide precise planning.

Time-Related Attributes: You can define the demand Horizon as absolute or relative. With absolute time periods, you define the demand Horizon precisely by defining a start and end date and a start and end time (calendar date). If using relative times, you do not define the demand Horizon with precise dates and times, but specify instead a duration starting from the current date. The system automatically determines the start and end date and the start and end time. If the demand Horizon is not to start on the current date, you can define an offset.

The relative demand Horizon is then defined as follows:

• Start of demand Horizon = current date + defined offset. The offset is made up of the offset in days and the additional offset in hours and minutes.
• End of demand Horizon = start of demand Horizon + defined duration of demand Horizon. The duration of the demand Horizon is made up of the duration in days and the additional duration in hours and minutes.

If you specify a factory calendar, the system considers nonworking days when calculating the start of the Horizon. In this situation, the planning Horizon always begins on a working day.

You can round the Horizon to full days and define the time zone to be used for this rounding.

Additional Selection Attributes: More selection criteria can be defined using additional selection attributes. You can select objects and their fields and the criteria.

Planning profiles are used to influence and control the outcome of the planning process. A planning profile must be specified for a background optimizer run as well as for interactive planning (manual planning) in the transportation cockpit. During planning, the system considers the settings that you make in the various planning profiles.

A user defines various settings on the planing profile. These settings determine how planning is to be performed. Settings belonging to a certain area are grouped together, for example, all the settings required for load planning are grouped under load planning settings. The following figures show the eight settings that are defined in the planning profile. All these settings can be maintained independently and can be used for other planning profiles as well.

In addition to these settings, the following functionality is defined in the planning profile as well:

• Planning Horizon: The planning Horizon defines the Horizon in which new freight documents can be created by planning. The planning Horizon is defined in the planning profile in days, hours, and minutes. The planning Horizon starts at the current system time unless an offset is defined in the planning profile. The offset can be defined in both the past and the future.
• Default Business Document Type: The business document determination rule defines which document types are used when freight orders and freight bookings are created during planning. The business document determination rule is defined for each planning profile and applies to documents created either manually or by the VSR optimizer. Freight order type and freight booking type can be determined in the following three ways:
  • The default type is defined in customizing
  • The type is defined in the planing profile directly
  • A condition can be used to determine the result
• Check: The check defines the check strategy and for handling capacity violation.
• Package building profiles: The package building profile is a collection of parameters with which you control the creation of packages. When you are doing package building based on the capacity documents, then you assign the package building profile to the planning profile. The package building profile is defined in customizing.
• Parallel processing profiles: By defining parallel processing the runtime for big optimization scenarios can be reduced. The parallel processing profile is defined in customizing and assigned to the planning profile.

  Strategies: The planning profile includes settings to control the different steps of the optimization. These steps are controlled by strategies. Strategies are made up of various programs. If you wish to perform manual planning or a scheduled planning run, there is a standard strategy for each function. Standard strategies are delivered by SAP. However, unique strategies can be created using a process controller.

1. Capacity selection settings: The capacity selection settings define which vehicle resources, containers, drivers, and schedules are selected for transportation planning. This setting involves selecting the resource capacity in the transportation cockpit. Schedules are also selected based on the criteria defined in the capacity selection settings. The mode of transportation can be maintained explicitly. Many fields in the resource can be used for selection. A few of them are listed below:
   • Location
   • Equipment types
   • ID
   • Planning Block
   • Resource owner

   Note: If you use resources for which you have defined an ADR limit, VSR optimization takes into account the number of ADR points for this resource during the optimization run. Moreover, you can specify that resources for which you have set a planning block are not displayed in the resource lists of the transportation cockpit.

   Note: The Agreement concerning the international carriage of Dangerous Goods by Road (ADR) is an international standard governing the transport of dangerous goods by road. The agreement describes an exemption based on the calculation of points for dangerous goods. If the points total calculated according to the method described does not exceed 1000 points, the exemption can be applied.

2. Optimizer Settings: Here, you can define the optimizer runtime, the maximum number of transshipment locations and processes, and the freight order building rule, for example. You also specify whether you require rough or detailed information for your planning activities, define the required process controller strategy, and configure the settings for generating transportation proposals.

   SAP delivers the planning strategies VSR_DEF and VSR_1STEP as standards for the optimization. You can use the planning strategy VSR_1STEP to control whether the system is to perform carrier selection immediately after VSR optimization. The results of the VSR optimization run are explained in the explanation tool.

   In the advanced settings, you can also specify whether the main aim in your transportation proposals is to ensure the lowest transportation costs possible or the shortest transportation duration possible, based on the planned delivery date/time. You can also define preferences in relation to your relative weighting of the variance of carriers, routes, and departure dates, or activate or deactivate capacity constraints at transportation mode level. You can also specify whether the system is to ignore certain settings such as the capacity or ADR limit of a resource during VSR optimization.

   VSR optimization generates a transportation plan from the optimization data consisting of planned freight orders. It processes freight orders already available from a previous VSR optimization run or manual planning. VSR optimization inserts the freight units into the transportation plan and modifies these initial solutions by, for example, loading a freight unit on to another capacity or by changing the delivery sequence of a capacity.

   The optimizer tries to minimize the total costs while adhering to the constraints. At the end of the planning run, VSR optimization returns the best solution found. You can generate multiple alternative transportation proposals for each freight unit. You can then choose to use one of them.

3. Load optimization settings for: Here, you can define the optimizer runtime, the planning strategy, and various rules for load planning. For example, you can define the maximum height difference between stacks in a row, stack height ascending in the driving direction. The standard strategy used for load optimization is ALC_DEF.
4. Constraints and costs settings: Here, you define costs related to freight units and means of transport. Usually, these costs are not actual costs. They simply offer a means of controlling the results of the optimization run (for example, earliness costs and lateness costs).
5. Incompatibility settings: Here, you define settings for your incompatibilities.
6. Carrier selection settings: Here, you specify whether the system is to use transportation allocations or business shares. The planning strategy used for carrier selection is TSPS_DEF. An additional strategy for cost, priority, cost+priory or cost* priority is defined.

   With Cost +Priority, Carrier 1 is ranked highest.

   With Cost*Priority, Carrier 2 is ranked highest.

   Carrier(s)	Cost	Priority	Cost+Priority	Cost*Priority
   Carrier 1	1000	20	1020	2000
   Carrier 2	1100	10	1110	11000
   Carrier 3	1200	30	1230	36000

7. Settings for manual planning: Here, you specify how you want the system to behave when it assigns documents and resources:
   • Assignment of documents: You use these settings to control how the system is to assign one or more requirement documents to a capacity document.
   • Removal of the assignment of documents: You use this setting to control how the system is to remove the assignment of requirement documents to capacity documents.
   • Assignment of resources and creation of documents: You use these settings to control how the system is to assign resources to documents and how it is to create and assign reference documents.
   • Driver Assignment: You use these settings to control how the system assigns trucks to the drivers.
8. Scheduling Settings: You define loading and unloading durations for scheduling. The schedule strategy defines the actions that are performed when scheduling is launched for a freight order or freight booking in the transportation cockpit. The standard strategy used for scheduling settings is VSS_DEF. The schedule strategy is assigned to the planning profile. Here, we define if the system considers the dates in the freight unit as constraints and whether a backward or forward scheduling direction is used.