The manual 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 met 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 Condition for Manual 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 |
| Lean Customer Returns (BDD) | Create a returns order |
| Warehouse Outbound Processing (3BS) | Create a sales order for storage location 175W |
| Advanced Intercompany Sales (5D2) | Create an intercompany sales order |
| Advanced Intercompany Stock Transfer (5HP) | Create an intercompany stock transfer order |
The manual transportation planning process supports different modes of transport: road, rail, air and sea. The process is performed by a user with role Dispatcher (TM) and uses the Transportation Cockpit, Manage Freight Orders and/or Manage Air/Ocean Freight Bookings apps.
The manual 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 perform manual planning. 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). In the Perform Manual Transportation Planning step, these freight units are assigned to freight orders or freight bookings. This can be done either in the Transportation Cockpit app or in one of the apps to manage freight orders or freight bookings (Manage Freight Orders, Manage Air/Ocean Freight Bookings).
The second step is the subcontracting step. In this step you can assign a carrier to your freight orders or freight bookings. Furthermore, you trigger the communication to the carrier via EDI in this step. Receiving the confirmation of the carrier is the third step. The carrier confirmation can be received via EDI which registers the confirmation automatically or, if you receive confirmation via mail or phone, you can register the confirmation manually in the freight order / freight booking. The final step is to trigger the creation of the delivery. This can be done for individual or multiple freight orders / freight bookings in the Manage Freight Orders and Manage Air/Ocean Freight Bookings apps, or via a scheduled batch job in the background.
For air, sea and advanced intercompany processes, the four process steps typically only create and relate to the freight booking for the main stage, while the planning for the pre-carriage and on-carriage stage has to be done subsequently based on the confirmation data for the main stage. In these cases a fifth step is inserted between the reception of the confirmation and triggering delivery creation. This step creates freight orders for pick-up for the pre-carriage stage and freight orders for delivery for the on-carriage stage.
For road and rail transportation, transportation planning and subcontracting is typically done by the shipper in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. In air and sea transportation, typically only the freight booking is created for subcontracting purposes by the shipper, whereas the detailed transportation planning is done by the forwarder. The information based upon the freight orders for pick-up and delivery are created on are provided by the forwarder to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition with the confirmation.
From a transportation process perspective, the transportation process continues with scope item 6W2 (Transportation Execution) while the next process step in the base processes is typically the picking of the delivery.