The logistics/transportation process involves activities and procedures spread across different business partners and often across several distributed systems. From a tracking perspective, this increases the challenges of successfully monitoring the progress of individual process parts. In this lesson, you will learn how your company can overcome these difficulties by using tracking solutions from SAP:
- SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace
- SAP Event Management
SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace and SAP Event Management allow you to make processes, assets, and performance visible across the supply chain. Extensive tracking and tracing functions allow process monitoring, automated exception resolution, proactive alerting, and extensive reporting in a single solution.
The key difference between both solutions is that SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace is a cloud solution that needs to be licensed separately. SAP Event Management is also available on-premise and can be run on the same SAP S/4HANA system with TM.
Event Management in SAP TM
The event management system is designed to work with several SAP ERP instances, if necessary. It can communicate with SAP CRM, where sales orders may be received, and this communication is processed back to the customer to support order fulfillment. SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO) may create the replenishment plan. SAP ERP or SAP Manufacturing Execution may be responsible for communication and tracking progress on the shop floor. SAP EWM (Extended Warehouse Management) may be responsible for the picking and packing as part of the logistics execution.
SAP Event Management offers visibility processes to monitor transportation execution in SAP TM. The transportation execution visibility processes enable users in roles such as transportation dispatcher, shipper, or ordering party to track and monitor planned events or to report an actual event.
Tracking and tracing is provided for the following business document types in SAP TM:
Freight unit
Freight order
Freight booking
Transportation unit
Resource
Instruction execution for standard operating procedures
In each case, the goal is to manage by exception, reduce time to action, and spend less time firefighting.
Monitor, notify, analyze, and adjust are the four cornerstones of SAP Event Management, which contribute to an adaptive solution. The monitoring process collects data from the various source systems. Notifications can be set up to be triggered, with alerts sent to the parties responsible if a process deviates from its anticipated course. The appropriate parties can simulate adjustments and make necessary changes based on the alerts. Finally, concerning analytics, SAP Event Management can be tied into the SAP BW environment to support transportation management reviews.
Event Types
SAP Event Management is capable of processing several different types of events. Within a given process, you have events that you expect to happen and events that happen. Typically, you want to compare the actual event against what you expected, as follows:
- Regular Event
The first type of event is an event that you expect to happen within a particular time frame, and it happens as expected. This is a regular event.
- Overdue Event
This is an event that you expect to happen within a particular time frame, and it occurs outside the scheduled time frame. An overdue event can cause a subsequent event to be rescheduled or recorded as an overdue event.
- Unexpected Event
The third type of event is unexpected. This could be a truck breaking down or a malfunction in a piece of equipment, potentially affecting subsequent events, causing something to be rescheduled, or taking another action. An unexpected event could trigger an alert or another type of notification.
- Unreported Event
In this case, you expect an event to occur within a particular time frame, but it is not reported for whatever reason. It is possible that something still needs to happen following this event, so you could set a time limit that sends a message or triggers something to happen when the event is unreported for a specific period.
Event Management Integration
Transportation operations is an area in which transparency is crucial, especially in those cases where lengthy transportation times have to be considered, such as when shipping overseas. To ensure customer satisfaction, keeping complete control of what is happening is more important than ever, even if parts of the business process may run outside your company’s sphere of influence.
Visibility processes for transportation management offer preconfigured, out-of-the-box content for transportation operations, supporting you in tracking relevant activities within and beyond the confines of your company. You can monitor different processes and business documents, such as freight units, orders, and bookings.
The Event Management Integration figure shows a typical scenario in which the SAP EM and TM systems are updated to accurately reflect a freight order's real-world progress.
During the loading process, SAP ERP or SAP EWM may send a signal (notification) that there is a delay in the loading process. This can trigger an alert. The transportation planner may have to adjust the schedule to ensure the container makes it to the ship on time. Once the ship has left the departure port, GPS updates may indicate it has not reached its midway point. This could be due to weather or mechanical issues. The customer service agent can be notified and contact the customer to inform them of anticipated delays.
Due to the alert system, the planning team does not have to watch over every order. They can spend most of their time managing exceptions.
Global Track and Trace
SAP Business Network is a cloud service with global coverage specifically built to connect logistics business partners – to collaborate across companies and jointly manage transactions, exchange documents and data, and share insights. You onboard to the network once and are set to connect and collaborate with many!
SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace is integrated with SAP S/4HANA Transportation Management to synchronize business objects and milestone updates. It captures, processes, and stores tracking information about logistics business processes with out-of-the-box visibility connectivity. In addition, it allows business users to achieve real-time transparency in executing those processes, conduct impact analysis, and manage exceptions.
Business benefits from SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace are derived from the global logistics visibility that the solution provides. There are three:
- Enhanced risk mitigation through data-driven decision-making.
Analyzing routes, events, and statuses for individual in-progress shipments alone can provide valuable insights into supply chain operations. By combining detailed transportation insights with the higher-level business context of a Sales Order, Purchase Order, or Stock Transport Order, natively integrated into a company’s ERP, provides supply chain managers with critical inputs into strategic decisions, such as supplier sourcing, route optimization, and inventory allocation, leading to improved business performance and competitiveness from a more resilient supply chain.
- Improved operational efficiency, including better inventory management.
Logistics visibility allows companies to optimize their transportation and distribution processes by identifying inefficiencies, streamlining routes, and consolidating shipments to minimize delays, improve resource utilization, and drive cost savings. Detailed logistics visibility enables more precise inventory management, enabling businesses to accurately monitor the movement of goods in real-time and with sufficient granularity to forecast inventory levels to avoid stockouts and unplanned long lead times or excess inventory and spoilage.
- Better customer service through faster problem resolution.
With detailed visibility into shipment routes and events, businesses can provide more accurate and timely updates to customers regarding the status and location of their shipments. When, or even before, issues arise during transit, such as delays, damages, or lost shipments, transportation planners can take action. Transportation planners can act upon predictive or reported status to pinpoint the location and situation of affected units and take immediate corrective actions, such as rerouting shipments or initiating investigations. This transparency then allows customer service personnel to enhance customer satisfaction by reducing uncertainty, improving responsiveness, and enabling better communication, which enhances customer loyalty.
SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace in SAP S/4HANA Transportation Management
SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace is integrated with SAP S/4HANA to track order fulfillment progress and goods in transit. Objects such as sales or purchase orders, freight units, tracking units, or shipments created in SAP S/4HANA are synchronized via IDOC interface to SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace along with planned and actual milestones such as arrival, departure, goods issue, goods received, …
To provide shippers (solution owners) a holistic multi-modal view into order fulfillment and goods in transit, SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace allows logistics service providers to integrate via public API or EDI 213 and 214 to receive order tracking requests for the respective tracked processes and share order events.
Optionally, additional licenses can be purchased to add visibility providers as an additional layer and reduce the integration efforts of individual logistics service providers. As visibility providers might have different expertise in different regions or modes, SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace can help distribute tracking requests to business partners.
As the tracked processes are populated with actual events, solution owners can understand the impact of deviations from the plan as events on the shipment level are correlated to deliveries or orders, and there is an impact analysis available for shipments ‘running late’ or being ‘delayed.’
Further, stakeholders can be kept in the loop as logic is built in to determine recipients and respective notification content through event-to-action scripts.
SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace Standard Application
There are standard applications tailored to different roles. For transportation planners, there is the Track Shipment app; for shipping specialists the Monitor Outbound Deliveries app and for internal sales representatives and purchasers there are the Track Sales Order Fulfillment app and the Track Purchase Order Fulfillment app, which includes stock transport orders. In addition, we support receiving specialists via the Monitor Inbound ASN app.
User attribute authorization allows solution owners to define who can see which shipment or tracked process.
However, SAP Business Network for Logistics is more than the above standard applications. Solution owners can utilize the flexible and extensible setup, which supports customer-defined fields, event types, and event-to-action scripts to extend standard applications or build custom scenarios from scratch.
SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace Example Scenario
Let’s look at an example tracked process for sales order fulfillment that utilizes standard and custom events and scripts (in the graphic below, black items need to be custom configured, and grey items are part of the standard delivery).
For each sales order, the following predefined milestones (planned events) and corresponding action are relevant:
- Goods issue – triggering a notification
- Proof of Delivery – triggering a notification
- Quality Inspection – triggering notification in case of quality KPI NOT fulfilled
- Goods Receipt – send customer survey
Additional actual events that might be received are:
- Confirmation of execution of sales order – notify customer
- Delay – update expected time of arrival in SAP S/4HANA Transportation Management
