Dear friends of SAP TM,

When you’re using an SAP S/4HANA system, one of the beauties is the tight and seamless integration of its modules. Therefore, it was a huge step forward for SAP Transportation Management to move to SAP S/4HANA with release 1709. With that, it makes your life so much easier to start with TM embedded in SAP S/4HANA compared to the sidecar scenario, as described here.

Nevertheless, there are surely still many good reasons to use SAP S/4HANA TM in a sidecar scenario when you have respective prerequisites. But when you already use SAP S/4HANA and start your TM journey, you should better aim for TM embedded in SAP S/4HANA to use all its advantages.

So, let’s go into detail what has to be done regarding master data and transactional data when integrating with TM embedded in SAP S/4HANA.

Master data:

As you already use SAP S/4HANA, your master data is set up and for TM only some additional steps as for instance the ones explained in the following are necessary.

If carriers are involved in your TM scenarios, those have to be set up as business partner with role ‘CRM010’.

Prerequisite for transport planning are locations for the source, destination and possible intermediate locations (as e.g. incoterm locations). Now, you have to distinguish whether the location has a reference object or not:

• Reference objects could be a business partner (customer/supplier), shipping/receiving point or any kind of plant. In that case, you can create your locations with report /SAPAPO/CREATE_LOCATIONS. But this is not mandatory, because as explained here, we create those locations also ‘on the fly’ during logistics integration. In case of the locations for business partners, we can create the locations also together with the business partner in transaction BP, as explained here.
• If the location has no reference object, as a port, railway station, airport etc., you need to create those locations in transaction /SCMTMS/LOC3. Important to mention is that if your location has a reference object, it should never be created with transaction /SCMTMS/LOC3 but with the means described before.

Another important master data objects are equipments and resources, e.g. when you want to do capacity planning. Thereby, equipments are vehicles (specific to the mode of transport), container units and handling resources (like a forklift) with basic attributes like physical properties etc.

They are maintained in customizing:

Resources then are the particular instances which can inherit the attributes of an assigned equipment. For example, the equipment is a truck with 7,5 to and the resource is the particular truck with its license plate. Resources are maintained in transaction /SCMTMS/RES01.

Transactional data:

Depending on your scenarios, you can integrate documents from SD/LE/MM with TM. This basically means that for the transport requirements of those documents freight units are created in TM with a reference to the respective document in SD/LE/MM.

Prerequisite is that a document of SD/LE/MM is TM relevant and that respective settings in TM are considered. This needs to be set up in the customizing of TM.

At first, a TM Control Key needs to be defined:

• Selecting an internal or external integration. In our case of integrating with TM embedded in SAP S/4HANA it’s of course the internal integration scenario
• Selecting the relevant integration scenarios. E.g. if you use delivery based outbound with sales orders you would choose ‘SD to TM’ and ‘Outb. Del.’. For an order based inbound scenario without delivery integration you choose ‘PD to TM’.

At next you need a Logistics Integration Profile:

There are many important settings which are considered during logistics integration, as:

• Freight unit building rule (which also needs to be set up: Profiles and Settings -> Create Freight Unit Building Rule)
• Settings for the building of stages during freight unit building (for details have a look here)
• Planning on requested or confirmed quantities

Next step is to define the TM relevance of a document from SD/LE/MM, thereby also maintaining a respective TM control key and a logistics integration profile. Hereby, the TM relevance can be maintained on different levels:

• SD: Sales org. / distribution channel / division / sales doc. type / shipping condition
• LE: Shipping point / delivery type / shipping condition
• MM: Purchasing org. / purchasing group / order type

If a document is TM relevant, it’s then decided within logistics integration whether an item or schedule line is transport relevant, as described on this blog post.

Now, when you have set up this, every newly created document in SD/LE/MM will be checked for TM relevance and may be integrated, dependent on your settings.

Furthermore, every time a document is changed or updated, those settings are checked. Means, if you e.g. created a sales order before the integration with TM and change it now after the integration is set up, it may be the case that the sales order is integrated with respective freight units being built. This has to be kept in mind when wondering why unplanned freight units are noticed in any worklist of TM. If you need to avoid this, you can for instance use BAdI /SCMTMS/BADI_LI_BTD_CHG.

On the other hand this means that if you want to integrate existing documents on purpose, those need to be ‘touched’ somehow to have them checked for TM relevance.

For documents like sales or purchase orders it might not be that relevant to integrate existing documents. But for long running scheduling agreements it is surely, so let’s take a look at them:

• Sales scheduling agreement: The same holds true as for sales orders…as soon as the sales scheduling agreement is updated e.g. with the next JIT call from the customer, the sales scheduling agreement is integrated (see this blog post for details about the integration of sales scheduling agreements with TM embedded in SAP S/4HANA). And as the sales scheduling agreement only has schedule lines for open requirements, only for those the freight units are built and it’s surely fair to say that this integration is seamlessly.
• Purchase scheduling agreements: Here unfortunately we don’t have such a seamless integration yet. Means…as soon as the purchase scheduling agreement is updated (e.g. by MRP) it’s also integrated with TM and freight units are build. The issue is just that in most of the cases the calculation of the open quantity as basis for the freight unit building will deliver wrong results as we would also consider the schedule lines from already fulfilled requirements which still are a contained in the purchase scheduling agreement. So, for the time being you have to either create a new purchase scheduling agreement or use BAdI /SCMTMS/BADI_LI_BTD_CHG , e.g. to define a kind of starting point from when on schedule lines should be considered for the integration with TM.

So, those are the very basic settings in the area of logistics integration and master data with some hints and best practices from my personal experience (which are no official guideline, as you will understand).

Appreciate your comments and feedback!

Best regards,

Michael