Transportation Units and Service Orders

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

Understand transportation units.
Describe service orders.

Transportation Units

Transportation Units (TUs) can represent both demand and capacity. They share some similarities with freight units (FUs) and others with freight orders (FOs), but they also differ from both FUs and FOs.

Scenarios involving trailers, railcars, containers, and packages can be modeled by TUs, abstracting from the specific documents called trailer units, railcar units, container units, and package units. For these scenarios you have to configure freight order types and transportation unit types.

Like freight documents, TUs have stages defining their paths through the network. While trailer, railcar, and container resources can be assigned to the corresponding TUs, package units represent one or multiple packages, each having an assigned packaging material. On the one hand, TUs cannot move themselves; instead, they require being moved by a truck, locomotive, vessel, or airplane and thus must be assigned to a freight document. Therefore, they represent a demand for transportation, like FUs.

The assignment of a TU to a freight document can be done directly–for example, trailer unit to road freight order–or indirectly, such as container unit to trailer unit, which is then assigned to a road freight order.

While a freight document cannot be assigned to another freight document, TUs allow nested assignments within this document category. For example, consider the following assignment chain: freight unit → package unit → container unit → trailer unit → road freight order. In this case, the TUs represent three consolidation levels between freight unit and road freight order. It is not possible to consolidate a trailer unit into another trailer unit, and this holds true analogously for railcar units, container units, and package units.

On the other hand, TUs can consolidate other demands. Therefore, they also represent a capacity for transportation, like freight documents. While a FU represents a single transportation demand, the TU can represent a set of transportation demands that can even have different source and destination locations. For example, a trailer is moved from location A to B to C, delivering three FUs: the first from A to B, the second from A to C, and the third from B to C. In general, TUs provide a lot of modeling capabilities but that requires more planning decisions and adds planning complexity. Therefore, we recommend avoiding using TUs if your business can be modeled without them. For many transportation scenarios, using TUs is mandatory because it is the only feasible way to model your business.

Ways to Create TUs

There are many ways to create TUs:

Manual planning can be done in the transportation cockpit, as described in Section.
The VSR optimizer can create trailer units and railcar units based on freight units, container units, and package units.
Load consolidation can create trailer units and container units based on freight units and package units.
Package units of linear distribution type can be extracted out of road freight orders.
FUB can create trailer units, railcar units, container units, and package units, but these TUs represent pure demand documents and do not allow consolidation.

Configuring TUs

Each TU has a specific type, which you can maintain in Customizing by following the menu path Transportation Management→Planning→Transportation Unit→Define Transportation Unit.

Within the TU type, you configure the most important settings for the TU. For example, you use the TU category to indicate whether you want to create the TU type for a trailer, a railcar, a container, or a package. When you then create the related business document (for example, a trailer unit), the system offers you only the relevant TUs.

Document Structure with Transportation Units

Document Structure with Transportation Units: An Explanation

The following table provides explanatory information about the preceding figure.

Transportation Order	Structure
Trailer TU 1	Contains FU 1 and FU 2 Defines own stages
Mover FO 1	Covers 1 TU stage
Mover FO 2	Covers 2 TU stages

For truck and trailer scenarios, you have to configure freight order types and TU types.

Service Order

Cleaning containers, fumigating, and performing security services or documentation are typical examples of services that can occur for items of a freight order (FO) or freight booking. The service order is used to account for and track services, calculate charges, and enable settlement of the charges for services that have been provided for individual items in a FO/booking or for the entire FO/booking.

You can create service orders in the following two ways:

Create service orders from freight bookings, FOs, freight booking items, or FO items. With such a service order, you can:
- Enter service items related to the freight booking, FO, freight booking item, or FO item.
- Add service items that are not related to the freight booking, FO, freight booking item, or FO item. You can do this using the Add Service action without marking another item.
Create standalone service orders without reference to any freight booking, FO, freight booking item, or FO item. You can use the Create Service Order function to create a service order by entering the service order type.

Structure of Service Order

A service order contains the following information:

General data including the service provider, service order type, and status of the service order
An item overview that contains the following information:
- Link to the freight booking or FO for which the service order was created. (Applies only for service orders created from freight bookings, FOs, freight booking items, or FO items).
- IDs of the original freight booking items or FO items for which services are to be carried out, for example, containers or products. (Applies only for service orders created from freight bookings, FOs, freight booking items, or FO items).
- Services to be carried out.
- The location at which the services are to be executed and the time period in which they are to be executed.
Transportation charges
Document dependencies as well as predecessor and successor documents (document flow)
Other information such as the following:
- Notes
- Attachments
- Change documents
- Administrative data
- Output management information

Customizing Service Order

You make the required settings for service orders in Customizing for Transportation Management under:

Freight Order Management→Define Item Types for Freight Order Management
Freight Order Management→Service Order→Define Service Order Types
Basic Functions→General Settings→Define Service Types.

You can use the change controller to define how the system reacts to changes.

Service Order Types, Service Item Types, and Service Types:

In Customizing, when defining service order types, you can specify the allowed service item types (these must be item types of the category Service). You make the required settings for service order types in Customizing for Transportation Management under Freight Order Management→Service Order→Define Service Order Types.

For each service item type, you can specify the allowed service types. For more information, see Customizing for Transportation Management under Freight Order Management→Define Item Types for Freight Order Management.

Then, you can use the service order type you defined to create a service order. You can specify one of the allowed item types for the order and the system proposes the default service type for that item type. You can specify a different service type. If you change this service type to a type that you have not specified in Customizing as allowed for this item type, the system returns a warning message.

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