It has been a while since SAP S/4HANA 2022 FP0 has been published.
With that release SAP TM delivered a lot of new and great features and innovations,
In release SAP S/4HANA 2022 we have significantly invested into further scenarios regarding integration, planning features and enhancements in charge calculation as well as interoperability and many many more topics in all other areas.
I wanted to mention the most important highlights in this blog to give you a glimpse on the newest and coolest features.
Let’s have a look into Advanced Shipping & Receiving first.
As you might already be well aware of SAP has delivered a new kind of integration between TM and EWM with SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS01 release. The processes are constantly enhanced to support additional scenarios.
With SAP S/4HANA 2022 release we extended the scenarios and now also support
Customer Return Handling in the Advanced Shipping and Receiving (ASR) process
Process Overview for Customer Returns with ASR
Based on a returns order in sales you can start the inbound process of a customer return now in TM. The whole process can be handled within ASR.
After planning of the freight unit in a freight order you can handle the physical inbound process the same way as you handle other inbound processes e.g. coming from a purchase order with the advanced shipping and receiving process.
There is much more about integration.
A feature that I really like is the new Incoterm handling.
We have harmonized the handling of Incoterms and Incoterm locations between sales or purchasing documents and TM documents. TM Locations can now consistently be used in master data (like business partners, info records and contracts) and all succeeding TM processes as all data is using unique master data in an end to end fashion. The huge benefit of doing so is that typos that frequently happened in the freetext Incoterm location fields in the past in MM and SD documents are prevented and followup issues in successor documents and processes in TM are not possible anymore.
Details about this feature are already available here: detailed blog.
In the area of Freight Order Management we constantly provide new innovation. One of these great innovations is the
Intelligent processing of faulty data in freight orders:
This is a pretty cool feature and helps a business user tremendously when processing freight orders that he has received by faulty inbound messages in the master data.
With this new feature we do not reject the faulty documents. Instead the business user gets suggestions on how to resolve faulty data as he can access and evaluate the issue based on error history and previous solutions.
Planning of freight documents is one of the most important areas withing SAP TM. The list of already existing functionality is endless and breathtaking.
However the stream of new cool features is continuing and also with this release we innovate further. Just too many to mention all of them in this blog. Therefore I want to restrict the list here to the greatest innovations.
Among those is the Creation of Capacity Documents Based on Groups.
So far when creating execution documents, you could manually sort in the Transportation Cockpit or combine manually the requirements that you wanted to plan together or add demands manually based on certain criteria e.g. by filtering when doing manual planning. Now, you can group requirement documents intelligently by grouping according to specific attributes and use this feature to create capacity documents.
The attributes are represented by grouping rules and a set of grouping rules is bundled in a requirement grouping profile
The requirement grouping profile allows to specify attributes by which requirement documents get grouped into capacity documents, e.g.: document type, source location of stage, destination location of stage, earliest start date/latest end date for loading/unloading, material freight group, preferred equipment type, shipping condition, Transportation mode, Carrier or incompatibility settings.
For each of these groups of requirement document stages, the system creates a capacity document.
This kind of grouping really provides a high flexibility.
Creation of Capacity Documents Based on Groups
You can trigger the creation of Capacity Documents based on Groups with a new action in the Transportation Cockpit app. This will improve manual planning efficiency significantly.
In the area of planning New layouts for basic shipping in the Transportation Cockpit are delivered. 5 new page layouts that serve as examples are provided to support basic shipping.
This means, that each of the layouts is provided per transportation mode (road, rail, air, ocean) and additionally a layout that include all of those transportation modes.
Additionally SAP delivers new hierarchy types for the basic variants as well.
Transportation Cockpit with Page Layout for All Modes for Basic TM
There are so many improvements and new features in the are of Package Building. All worth to be listed here, but I want to limit it and specifically mention only some of them. One of it is the support of Mixed Layers within the Package Building Optimizer. With this new enhancement you can now use the Package Building Optimizer to consume and consider layer definitions and to provide detailed results like position information for a layer-based mixed package.
Mixed layer visualization
In above picture you can see in the list view how the PBO provides an optimized result using layer definitions providing exact positions on a the layers
Furthermore Package Building now also supports Packing Instructions.
This is great news. As you know the Unified Package Building (UPB) already supports TM and EWM. With this new feature now also Logistics General (LO) supports UPB with the Packaging Instructions that are used in LO.
You can create packages using unified package building, a generic packaging layer. Up unit now, automatic packing in Logistics General (LO), Transportation Management (TM), and Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) used differing packing engines based on different packing rules: In LO, based on packing instruction master data, in TM package building based on product master data and package type assignment settings, in EWM based on packaging specification master data. Unified package building enables you to use your preferred packing engine in all three components, for example, to use package building not only in TM but also in LO and EWM.
In the area of Freight Collaboration with carriers we deliver a new carrier app to Manage Execution of Freight Orders.
With this feature, you can furnish your carrier with an app to report the execution of freight orders.
Overview of freight orders in execution
In the overview the carrier gets a list of all freight orders assigned to him for execution.
The carrier can navigate into his worklist, report events directly in the list or access an individual freight order to see all activities he needs to perform with all the required details. In a particullar freight order he or the actual driver can report actual events, delays, or upload documents (like POD documents) during execution.
Freight order with details and event reporting
All the events, further information and documents are instantly visible to you as the shipper and you can react accordingly to exceptions during the execution process.
There is also quite some improvements in the area of Charge Calculation. With Advanced Shipping and Receiving a new object called Consignment Order has been introduced. Now you can use Charge Calculation for Consignment orders and calculate charges also for sub-stops.
Charge Calculation for Sub-Stops in ASR
Another notable feature is the usage of Charge Calculation for Planned Distance. The planned distance may have been handed over directly from the carrier or it was calculated directly in TM. To enable this new feature a new calculation base for the planned distance has been provided and it can be used on all levels of charge calculation.
As you know TM is constantly investing in interoperability to make sure that TM works well with external systems. Here are just some examples where we have extended our Interfaces & APIs.
- SOAP API: Freight Charges Processing
With this feature, you can update transportation charges in freight orders or freight bookings using an asynchronous business-to-business (B2B) inbound service. You can update the relevant parameters for a particular charge line, for example calculation bases, rate amount and rate currency. The charges are relevant for single or multiple business partners, for example carriers, based on the freight orders or freight bookings.
- Freight Agreement and Forwarding Agreement Interfaces to Support Agreements with Multiple Purchasing/Sales Organizations and to Support Agreements with Charge Item Hierarchies
The two available interfaces for freight and forwarding agreement interfaces are extended with new features, so that you can now create freight and forwarding agreements with multiple purchasing or sales organizations. The interfaces now support additionally charge items that have a parent-child relationship. You can use the interface as well to send freight or forwarding agreements with multiple purchasing or sales organizations or a hierarchical parent-child relationship to external systems.
As I mentioned above, this blog is only about some of the highlights. If you want to get more and additional information about the latest and greatest on the current release, please check the following resources:
- Release Notes
- What’s New Viewer
- SAP TM Product Page on sap.com
- SAP Community for Transportation Management
- SAP Transportation Management Group on LinkedIn
