Transportation planning processes often differ based on the mode of transportation. Whereas road and rail transportation is typically planned directly, ocean and air transports typically involve several transportation stages (from source location to port of loading, from port of loading to port of discharge, from port of discharge to final destination).
The following video shows how the transportation process for road transportation is embedded into an outbound sales process.
The manual transportation planning - outbound process for ground transport involves six user roles:
- Internal Sales Representative
- Dispatcher
- Shipping Specialist
- Billing Clerk
- Transportation Manager
- Accounts Payable Accountant (Freight Cost)
The process begins with a sales order created by an Internal Sales Representative which, if deemed transportation relevant, leads to the creation of freight units. The key role in this process, the Dispatcher, uses these freight units to manually plan transportation, assign freight units to a vehicle type, and create a freight order. Transportation charges can be calculated and allocated to specific sales order items, and the carrier provides subcontracting status reports. The Manage Freight Orders app is used for execution phase monitoring and delivery triggering. The Shipping Specialist executes goods issuance and enables the Billing Clerk to create customer billing documents. After freight loading, the Transportation Manager confirms the freight order for accruals posting, and the Accounts Payable Accountant concludes the process by matching incoming supplier invoices or issuing credit memos before transferring charges to accounting.
To highlight how mode of transport changes the process, the following video walks through an ocean freight booking process. In this video the ocean freight booking process is embedded into an inbound procurement process for which transportation planning is in the responsibility of the buyer, e.g. if you purchase materials from a vendor with incoterm ex works (EXW).
In this process, the result of planning is not one freight document, but three freight documents:
- Freight order for pick-up to represent the pre-carriage from the source location to the port of loading.
- Freight booking to represent the main-carriage from port of loading to port of discharge.
- Freight order for delivery to represent the on-carriage from port of discharge to destination location.
The freight orders for pick-up and delivery can be either road or rail freight orders. They are typically created based on information from the ocean forwarder received with the booking confirmation.
Subsequently, in the transportation execution processes, events and/or statuses for all three freight documents can be reported into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and monitored using the Manage Freight Orders and Manage Ocean Freight Bookings apps, respectively.
The process for air transportation works similar to the ocean transportation process, typically involving multiple transportation stages.