Introducing Transportation Management

The different business processes that are available in the area of transportation management are characterized by their starting point (sales order for an outbound process, purchase order for an inbound process, stock transport order for an intracompany process), and how the planning tasks are to be accomplished. Planning can be done with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition or using a decentral transportation management (TM) planning system (either using a third-party transportation management system or using an SAP S/4HANA TM system with scope item 4OZ).

Each transportation process starts with a transportation demand, which is called a freight unit. The freight units originate from their predecessor documents, which can be sales orders, sales scheduling agreements, purchase orders, or stock transport orders. In the planning process, the freight units are assigned to transportation orders (either freight orders for road or rail transport, or freight bookings for air and sea transport). As indicated in the following figure, the planning process can be performed (1) with a third-party transportation management system, (2) with an external SAP S/4HANA TM system or (3) within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition itself.

When the planning process is completed within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, it is referred to as manual transportation planning. A separate process solution supports the integration with an external transportation planning process.

Before transportation execution, deliveries with reference to the initiating documents (sales orders, purchase orders, and stock transport orders) are created based on transportation orders. The transportation orders also register the execution status of the transportation process (loading, departure, arrival, unloading). Furthermore, the transportation orders are the basis for freight cost calculation. Freight costs are calculated based on contracts with external carriers. These contracts are called freight agreements in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and include the detailed freight rates. The freight costs are settled with the carriers and posted to financial accounting.

The available scope items in the domain of transportation management depend on the localization. The available scope items are defined by process step scope.

There are four scope items available for the different process steps transportation planning (6W1 for external planning and 6W2 for planning within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition), transportation execution (6W3) and freight settlement (6W4). From release 2308 of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, these scope items replace the scope items that have been available before.