The external transportation planning process can be based on several base processes depending on whether your intention is to plan outbound, inbound or intra-company transportation.
The following base processes are supported.
Depending on the base process certain business condition have to be me in order to initiate the transportation process. These can be the creation of a sales order in the Sell from Stock (BD9) process or the creation of the purchase order in the Direct Procurement with Inbound Delivery (2TX) process.
Business Conditions for External Transportation Planning
| Base Process | Business Condition |
|---|---|
| Sell from Stock (BD9) | Create a sales order |
| Sales Scheduling Agreements (3NR) | Generate the planning delivery schedule |
| Direct Procurement with Inbound Delivery (2TX) | Create a purchase order |
| Stock Transfer with Delivery (BME) | Create a stock transport order |
The external transportation planning process supports the modes of transport road and rail. The process is performed by a user with role Dispatcher (TM) and uses the Manage Freight Units and Manage Freight Orders apps.
The external transportation planning process consists of four steps that are independent from the base process and the mode of transport that you need to use. The first step is to review freight unit details. Optionally freight units can also be checked in the list view of the Manage Freight Units app. Freight units can be filtered by various criteria. The dispatcher may want to focus on blocked freight units only at this stage of the process. A prerequisite to this step is that freight units must have been created based on any of the base processes from a predecessor document (e.g. sales order, purchase order). Freight units are sent to an external system in this process. There, they are planned. That means, freight orders are created, freight units are assigned to them and they are subcontracted in the external system. When they are set to Ready for Transportation Execution in the external planning system, the planned freight orders are returned from the external system to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Here, these freight orders can be monitored and delivery creation is triggered for them.
When freight orders have been planned in the external system, the dispatcher is responsible for reviewing that transportation charges are correctly calculated, and costs are distributed. Charge calculation and cost distribution are executed automatically right after the freight orders are received from the external transportation management system. The final step is to trigger the creation of the delivery. This can be done for individual or multiple freight orders in the Manage Freight Orders app or via a scheduled batch job in the background.
From a transportation process perspective, the transportation process continues with scope item 6W3 (Transportation Execution) while the next process step in the base processes is typically the picking of the delivery.