Transportation Planning Status in SAP TM

 Dear friends of SAP TM,

When you do your transport planning in TM based on transport requirements from deliveries, it’s essential to keep track of the status of the transport planning in the delivery. E.g. it’s very obvious that you don’t want to trigger follow-on activities like goods issue before transportation planning is done completely. Therefore, the delivery provides the so-called ‘Transportation Planning Status’ on header level:

But with this transportation planning status, it’s not as easy as it seems as there are several variables in the equation which have to be considered. E.g. when consignment orders come into play, or transportation units, statistical stages…it’s safe to say that there are some pitfalls which can lead to misunderstandings of this status. Let’s hope we can bring some light in the grey areas of the status’ interpretation.

Basic principle

The basis for the calculation of the transportation planning status are always freight units. To check the planning status of a freight unit, we derive the topmost capacity document of any stop of the freight unit. This could be either a freight document (freight order / freight booking), a consignment order, a transportation unit or the freight unit itself. When it’s a freight document, the respective stage is treated as ‘planned’, otherwise it’s ‘unplanned’. And so is the status consolidated on the freight unit by considering all stages, ending up in freight units being ‘planned’, ‘partially planned’ or ‘unplanned’.

For calculating the transport planning status of a delivery, we then take one exemplary freight unit which is assigned to the delivery and calculate its planning status. This is fine because assuming there are two freight units assigned to the delivery and their transportation planning status differs, this means they’re planned differently and thus there would have been a delivery split.

Let’s see a very simple example here before digging into details:

Examples and use cases

Now as we have seen the basic principle how to calculate the transportation planning status of a delivery with the planning status of a freight unit, we talk about the mentioned pitfalls with the following examples.

Statistical and planning relevant stages

Things get a bit more complicated with numerous stages, of course. And we could even have statistical stages, for instance when incoterm locations are considered (see this blog post).

So, let’s see the following examples:

Here you see the following principle when the transport consists of several stages :

• No stage is planned -> freight unit is unplanned
• Some stages but not all are planned -> freight unit is partially planned
• All stages are planned -> freight unit is planned
• Statistical stages are not considered

Consignment Order

The assignment of a freight unit to a consignment order does not change the transportation planning status. This happens only when the consignment then is assigned to a particular freight document.

Transportation Unit

When a freight unit is assigned to a transportation unit, this has also no effect on the transportation planning status. It could be the result of a load planning as part of the transport planning, but in this context we treat only those stages as planned which have a freight document assigned.

Technical Details

After having seen the basic principle along with several examples, we finally talk about how ‘it’ actually happens. So, whenever planning of a freight unit in TM changes (e.g. assignment of a freight unit to a freight document etc.), the planning status of the freight unit is adjusted immediately and so is also the transport planning status in the corresponding delivery.

Hopefully this gives you some insights how the transportation planning status in the delivery is calculated and what it stands for from the process view.

Appreciate any thoughts and feedback!

Best regards,

Michael

Source: https://blogs.sap.com/2023/05/08/transportation-planning-status-in-sap-tm/