Introducing Logistical Master Data

Organizational management is a means for creating and managing the organizational and staffing structures in your company. Organizational management uses an organizational model as its basis.

In Transportation Management (TM) in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, the organizational structure consists of the following organizational units:

• Company organization

  This organizational unit corresponds to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) company code containing the local currency. The company organization unit is used for invoicing and charging.

• Purchasing organization

  The purchasing organization is the organizational unit that is responsible for purchasing. It negotiates and creates freight agreements. Later, the purchasing organization is assigned in the freight order for charge calculation and settlement.

• Purchasing group

  The purchasing group is a subordinate organization to a purchasing organization.

The TM organizational units are different from those used in other processes or modules like materials management (MM). Therefore, the TM organizational units have to be created in an early stage from the enterprise structure. For this purpose, you can use the Create and Update TM Organizations - From Enterprise Structure app. Within this app, you select the purchasing organization and purchasing group, for which you want to create or update TM organizations. The report creates or updates the TM organizational units for the company code, purchasing organization, and purchasing group according to your selection.

In SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, the Business Partner is the leading object and single point of entry to maintain business partner, customer, and supplier master data.

This is to ensure the ease of master data maintenance and to achieve harmonization between them. Compared to classical enterprise resource planning (ERP) transactions, maintenance of customer and supplier master data through the business partner has many advantages. These advantages are as follows:

• A legal entity is represented with one business partner.
• The Business Partner allows maintenance of multiple addresses with corresponding address usages.
• Multiple roles can be associated to the same business partner.
• Maximal data sharing and reuse of data that leads to an easier data consolidation.
• General data available for all different business partner roles, specific data is stored for each role.
• Maintenance of multiple relationships to the same business partner.
• Maintenance of time dependency at different sub-entities roles, address, relationship, bank data, and so on.

Using the Maintain Business Partner app, you can create, display, and edit business partner master data. This app serves as a single point of entry to business partner master data.

You can create, change, search, display, and copy business partner master data with the role SAP_BR_BUPA_MASTER_SPECIALIST.

Business partners represent a person, organization, group of persons, or group of organizations in which a company has a business interest. You create and manage your business partners (BPs) and the roles they assume for your company centrally and use it for various business transactions. You define the general business partner data and assign business partner roles (BP roles) to the business partner. Specific data is stored for each business partner role. In this way, you do not store redundant data, since the general data is independent of a business partner’s function or application-specific extensions. When you first create a business partner in the system, the BP role general business partner is automatically assigned to the business partner.

Assigning partner functions determines the functions of particular partners in the process. One partner can have several functions. For example, when all the partner functions within the customer partner type are assigned to one business partner, the same customer is the sold-to party, ship-to party, payer, and bill-to party.

A carrier to whom you subcontract your freight orders, and with whom you have negotiated freight agreements, is the business partner most relevant to the transportation process. A carrier is created as a business partner with the following roles:

• Business Partner (Gen.)
• Carrier
• Supplier
• Supplier (Fin.Accounting)

The Business Partner (Gen.) role holds some general information like the name, search term, legal form, address, and payment details of the carrier. The Carrier role is required to use the business partner as a carrier in freight orders or freight agreements. The Supplier and Supplier (Fin.Accounting) roles represent the link to the organizational structure (purchasing organization and company code) to run financial processes (payment of the carrier for his services).

To learn more about the system-related activities, refer to the following simulation, Maintain Carrier Business Partner.

Business Partners can be assigned to TM organizations. To assign business partners to a TM organization or to change existing assignments, you can use the Assign Business Partner to TM Organization app.

Locations are the logistical/technical master data object that represents the address data for the pick-up and delivery location of any transport. Each freight unit must have a source location and a destination location. The source location is typically the shipping point from where the transport should start, whereas the destination location is typically the delivery address of the customer.

The following are some of the purposes of locations:

• Freight is moved between locations.
• A freight unit always has both a source location and a destination location.
• A freight unit can travel through a number of locations.

There are different ways for how locations are created or updated.

• Creating locations using a report

  Use the Create Locations app to create locations through a background report. You can use this report to create new locations for plants, shipping and receiving points, and business partners.

• Updating locations using a report

  The Update Location app allows you to update locations using a background report. You can use this report to update locations for plants and shipping and receiving points.

• Manual creation using an app

  You can use the Manage Locations app to manually create locations. For example, to represent ports, airports, or railway stations. Furthermore, you can display, edit, and delete locations using this app.

  Geocoordinates can be entered manually into locations or calculated automatically. For automatic calculation Transportation Management must be integrated with SAP HANA spatial services (scope item 46P).

• Creating locations out of business documents

  If you create or update a business document (such as a sales order or a purchase order) that is relevant for Transportation Management (TM), the system checks that all necessary locations needed to represent plants, shipping points, and business partners in TM are present in the system. If a location has not already been created, the system creates it. This automated process is primarily used to create locations.

For transportation processes, the geographical coordinates (geocoordinates) of a location and the distance and duration between pairs of locations are important.

To determine geocoordinates for locations, and distances, and durations for pairs of locations within Transportation Management, the consumption of SAP HANA spatial services as part of the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is required. For this, an SAP BTP account is needed that is enabled for consumption-based commercial models, such as the Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA). Scope item 46P delivers the necessary settings and information to activate the integration between SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP HANA spatial services running on SAP BTP.

You will find setup instructions for scope item 46P in the SAP Signavio Process Navigator: Determination of Geocoordinates, Distances and Durations (46P)

Distance and duration determination is especially important for road transportation, as it allows you to determine the road distance, which you may need to calculate distance-dependent freight charges and to determine the transport duration in order to schedule your freight orders properly. To have visibility about distances and duration enables better planning decisions in the transportation cockpit.