With Release 4.0, the following enhancements are available for
shipping activities:
New partner roles
The new functions for calculating and
settling shipment costs require additional partner roles that can
be specified in the shipment document or in the shipment cost
document. These include the transportation service agent (partner
role SP), the carrier (TF), or loading supervisor (TL). Within
shipment processing, other partners can be specified in addition to
the transportation service agent. These partners are entered in the
shipment header using the new function "Partner", and they apply to
the entire document.
When a shipment cost document is
created, the service provider from the shipment (header or stage)
is copied into the shipment cost item. There, the invoicing party
and the payment recipient are determined from the master record of
the service agent, if different creditors are specified in the
master record.
During shipment cost settlement, the
transportation service agent, invoicing party, and the payment
recipient are passed on to the purchase order, to the service entry
function, to the FI document and the CO document.
It is possible to transfer output to
the partners defined in the shipment. During the calculation of
shipment costs, the transportation service agent serves as a
characteristic for determining the shipment costs (determination of
pricing procedure and the conditions). The payment recipient is the
vendor during settlement of the shipment costs.
Create shipments in collective processing mode
As of Release 4.0 it is possible to
have shipments created automatically in the system (in dialog mode
or background processing). For this, you can define simple rules,
for example, on how deliveries are to be grouped together to
shipments.
The collective processing run can be
used in the following areas:
to create individual shipments
to create stop-off shipments
to achieve Full Truck Load (create one shipment per
delivery)
to create parts of a transportation chain
to create entire transportation chains
to define groups for fields that can used as a common criterion
(for example, shipping points 1 and 2 can be defined as a group if
they are close to each other). You can then continue to use the
combination criterion "shipping point"; however, it is also
possible to transport deliveries from shipping 1 and 2 together on
the basis of their common grouping.
Groupings can also be used to define
the sequence of deliveries within a shipment (for example, using
the postal code, the transportation zone, etc.).
Collective processing usually
consists of the following three parts:
Definition of the selection variants
You must define which deliveries are
to be included. Here you have the same selection criteria as for
individual creation of a shipment.
Definition of combination criteria
You define which fields are to be
identical in the deliveries so that the deliveries can be grouped
together into one shipment. You can also specify the sequence of
the deliveries in the shipment and capacity limits for the
shipments that are to be included. For the definition of
combination and sort criteria, fields can be selected from a field
catalog that contains roughly 80 fields of the delivery
header.
Specification of data for the shipments
You can specify data that is to be
entered into the created shipments. This data includes the
forwarding agent and dates.