While the functionality of stage building based on movement type in the forwarding order is well documented and known, there is another more “hidden” feature for movement types in freight bookings, which might help you to set-up a leaner scenario for container consolidation scenarios in the future.

For different industries the Freight Booking be it ocean or air freight find a wide variety of usages, from directly booking port to port with an ocean carrier to handing over the complete door to door transport from Shipping Point to Customer to a transportation service provider.

One of the transportation service provider use-cases for the booking is also to handle the end-to-end transportation of LCL freight units for the containerized part between Container Freight Station at port of departure (in Air Freight we call it Gateway) and the CFS/Gateway at port of arrival.

Freight Booking – Movement Types

As indicated in the figure above the forwarder could hand over the complete booking to the ocean/air carrier or actually organize/handle the pick-up CFS to Port and delivery from Port to CFS himself.

Looking at the Freight Booking Terms & Conditions Tab below, there are the fields for the consolidation level at Source Location & Destination Location, which obviously control if there is a pre- or on-carriage stage at all in the freight booking.

Freight Booking – Terms and Conditions

The movement type on the other hand will not influence the structure of the booking itself, but will control which stages are actually relevant to be send to the carrier and will be settled with the carrier in the end instead of being organized by the ordering party itself.

How does it work:

When entering a movement type the system will look up the customizing SAP Customizing Implementation Guide->Transportation Management->Forwarding Order Management->Define Stage Type Sequence for Movement Types” and check if the movement type has a stage type assigned of category pre-/on-carriage.

• If there is a pre-carriage stage assigned the booking will consider the pre-carriage as relevant for subcontracting.
• If there is an on-carriage stage assigned the booking will consider the on-carriage as relevant for subcontracting.

Movement Type – Stage Type assignment Customizing

What is the effect:

• Charge Calculation will exclude the pre-/on-carriage stage if not subcontracting relevant as per customizing
• The Booking Subcontracting message will exclude the pre-/on-carraige stage if subcontracting relevant as per customizing

Charge Calculation – Port to Port

Charge Calculation – Door to Door

Conclusion:

This modelling can have multiple advantages:

• LCL and FCL bookings can be handled the same way, which is highly apreciated by users, as they do not have different document chains for different cargo
• Freight Booking offers a central place for the complete operation between pick-up and delivery location
• No need to create a seperate container unit to handle the containerized part of the journey