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.

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.