Need for embedded TM

Supply chain activities come along with various imperative capabilities that require the integration of several solutions to ensure smooth operations. The standalone SAP TM must be linked together with solutions such as Warehouse Management, Order Management, Global Trade Services (for international trade), Customer Relationship Management, and such to complete the overall supply chain process.

With SAP S/4 HANA embedded TM, the multisystem landscape of the overall supply chain landscape can be eliminated, and further integration of SAP S/4 HANA applications can be fostered seamlessly.

Embedded SAP TM over standalone SAP TM

Standalone or decentralized SAP TM requires a separate ERP system to carry out new upgrades and maintenance. It allows transparency across the transportation division of the entire supply chain and needs continuous integration of systems such as warehouse management.

The initial launch of the SAP TM on SAP S/4 HANA allocated an expanded experience over the Fiori apps usage with both inbound and outbound processing. The embedded analytics helped organizations to determine their performances then and there without having to depend on a performance calculator tool.

The recent enhancements on the SAP S/4 HANA embedded TM give out a simplified supply chain landscape, reduced redundancies on documents, seamless integration of finance and order management into S/4 HANA and does not require any duplicity for configuration. It also allocates a simplified and agile integration of the three parties – vendor, carrier, and customer. These capabilities augment the features of the embedded TM when compared to the standalone system.

Business Benefits of embedded SAP TM

Enhanced Shipping and Receiving Process

The newest capability of the SAP S/4 HANA embedded SAP TM is that it supports multiple warehouse and supply chain frameworks within a single freight order. This leads to improved accuracy and consistency in the processing of shipments.

Improved Asset Utilization

The multi-drop and pick shipping settlements within warehouses for loading, unloading, and harmonization of inbound and outbound deliveries lead to a proper and fulfilled utilization of the company assets.

Seamless Freight Order Management

Freight Order Management is a structural part of the shipping and receiving process that shows the status values of checked and non-checked freight bookings, orders, and consignment orders. The estimation on loaded and unloaded goods, execution of the reverted tasks, will help increase the freight visibility.

Effective Planning and Optimization

The new features for planning and optimization of the SAP S/4 HANA embedded SAP TM bring about increased accuracy on the planning of loading and unloading trucks, effective usage of the floor spacing, visibility of the warehouse loading stops schedule, and plan the performance of the carriers beforehand.

Collaborative Freight Agreement

Advanced and improved freight agreement negotiations within parties (shippers and carriers) even on third-party vendor systems (non-SAP). Companies can send in Request for Quotations (RFQs) through their Freight Agreement

RFQs access to effectively monitor and collaborate.

Strategic priorities for the SAP TM roadmap

The roadmap is created considering the efficacy of the SAP S/4 HANA for enhanced integrations, functionality, usability, business profitability, and harmonization. Integration is one of the major driving factors to consider the embedded TM in the future visions along with simplified user experience, enhanced analytic capabilities, and leveraging next-gen processes & technologies.

Learn more on SAP solutions – SAP TMS, SAP EWM, SAP S/4 HANA, SAP Commerce Cloud

• So, how fast the global logistics industry is growing? Deloitte reports that by the year 2024, global freight volume is forecast to surge from 54.69 billion tons (2015) to 92.1 billion tons. It’s almost twice as much in just a decade. As promising as this tremendous boom is, it is incredibly complex to efficiently plan, execute, and manage transport operations, especially when businesses need real-time reporting capabilities for better decision-making. It becomes equally important to optimize supply chain processes, control costs, and deliver goods to customers on time.
• Whether it is the challenge of demand fluctuation, the complex marketplace, or increasingly changing customer demands, SAP Transportation Management is designed to swiftly respond to disruptions in the supply chain.
• The ability to quickly spot bottlenecks, and deliver cost-effective, transparent, and comprehensive transportation management solutions elevate SAP Transportation Management above any other supply chain solution. SAP TMS is a key interface that provides freight forwarders with an efficient platform to successfully manage fast-growing transport volumes, tender transportation operations, and handle transportation charges.

Consolidate orders

Shipment costs are posing a real challenge to businesses. In order to avoid the hassle of dispatching goods individually, and the costs associated with that, companies try to find better solutions. SAP Transport Management makes it easier to pack resources, put goods together and send them out together to reach customers easily and quickly.

By achieving this, the SAP Transport Management solution empowers businesses to gain higher sales volumes and track consolidated orders.

Forecast demand & shipment volumes accurately

The system is well-built to accurately model the demand factors for all the products in your freight line-up. This level of precision reduces the problem of overstocking. You can predict the volumes of shipment and optimize the transportation plans accordingly. With this improved forecast accuracy, freight teams can introduce goods to the supply chain in a faster and controlled way.

Better transportation planning

By providing businesses with an accurate trackability of shipments in transit, SAP Transport Management enables them to optimize their use of supply chain carriers.

Enterprises can fine-tune their logistics operations to deliver better carrier management, freight tracking and monitoring, and gain real-time visibility.

Scale as need demands

Customers expect efficiency, speed, and want their products whenever they want. SAP Transport Management delivers customizable tools to help address unique business needs.

We provide baseline configurations for demand spike scenarios to handle any unexpected surge in demand. With its tightly integrated value chain solution, SAP Transport Management helps businesses leverage their product delivery capabilities at a large scale through a truly dynamic supply chain.

If you are looking to have more understanding of SAP solutions including SAP TM, SAP EWM, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP BRIM, SAP Subscription Billing, and SAP Plant Maintenance, kindly reach out to our experts at Mobolutions.

The key challenges

1. Operational Challenges

• A lack of transparency in the whole transportation process.
• A lack of reporting and analysis based on real-time tracking.
• A need for an enhanced and digitized supply chain.

2. Strategic Challenges

• Difficulties in adapting to the changes in modern trends
• Costly and unprofitable supply chain

What are the requirements for visibility?

Each industry has its own unique requirements when it comes to visibility.

Visibility in Events Management

• Planned and unplanned activities
• Productivity and performance progress
• Accuracy of the overall work process

Cost & Revenue

Visibility in the cost and revenue brings out the clarity in understanding and analyzing the cost per product, ocean transport, and extra payment for carrier drivers.

Logistical Management

• Understand the vehicle capacity and usage.
• Vehicle and labor performance indicator.
• Temperature analysis
• Telematics

What is the industry-specific requirements for visibility?

E-commerce

• Transparency in the shipping, and last-mile delivery.
• Track ability of the shipping products
• Cost analysis of shipping
• Inter-company product-service analysis for B2B

Logistics Service Provider

• Visibility of the carrier driver
• Analytics on the origin and destination pair
• Visibility on the container capacity
• Visibility of the third-party warehouse

Manufacturing

• Tracing batch-wise products
• Integrating with the third-party service vendor
• Time analysis taken for the turnaround
• Visibility on the carrier

Enhance Visibility with SAP TM

The need to digitize the overall supply chain business cycle is to overcome certain challenges such as reduced capacity in the manufacturing chain, need for volatility for goods & services, balancing labor, and fulfilling shortages.

The SAP Transport Management System (SAP TM) allows organizations to have a clear perspective of the movement of their goods across the globe. It improves the business process, carries out inventory management, optimizes transport, visibility, reduces labor and transportation costs, and manages freight.

The main objective of SAP TM focuses on higher visibility of the supply chain through informed decision-making and agile workflow.

As we all know, the supply chain is a complex division that works along with multiple partners including vendors and clients. It needs a lot of intelligent technologies and transparency to streamline the fragmented segments, trades regulations, and layered visibility.

That’s where the utilization of SAP TM becomes the ultimate solution. It can work as a standalone or embedded solution in accord with the unique industrial requirements.

Functionalities of the SAP TM solution

The SAP Transport Management solution sets out an end-to-end multimodal visibility infrastructure that allows companies to track and trace their product at every point of transport starting from the warehouse to the port of loading to the port of discharging to the final delivery destination. As the transit takes up a lot of road and ocean/airtime, it becomes imperative to solutions such as SAP TM to enhance the perceptibility of product logistics.

Freight management in SAP TM

Freight Order

It allows the companies to have a clear perspective of the completed loads, departed carriers, roadway travel and arrival at the port of loading, and unloading of the goods at the port.

Freight Booking

Freight Agreement in SAP TM allocates container loading, unloading, vessel capacity, departure, and arrival at the port of discharge, and the container unloading at the port of unloading.

Freight Order

It allows logistics operations to have a clear view of the completed loads for delivery, a departure from port, on-road details, arrival, and unloading at the customer’s delivery place.

The access to the carrier network is done via API-based connections and the onboarding easiness comes in through an email-based registration that paves its way for digital communication with the carrier and the delivery place.

Now, all the reports obtained from the Freight settlements can be put together for analytics to observe the performance. The scalable and integrated approach of SAP TM also carries out customer service, product data management, security, and brings in skilled laborers. For retail businesses, SAP TM helps enable the omnichannel system and helps to cope with the global competition.

If you are looking to have more understanding of SAP solutions including SAP TM, SAP EWM, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP BRIM, SAP Subscription Billing, and SAP Plant Maintenance, kindly reach out to our experts at Mobolutions.

How should organizations prepare themselves to deal with these emerging challenges?

SAP Transportation Management System (TMS)

SAP Transportation Management helps industries in the physical transportation of goods from one place to another.

Using this module, companies can easily transfer orders and deliveries by creating freight bookings, planning transportation, and selecting proper carriers.

SAP TMS supports timely execution updates for order-to-cash and procure-to-pay scenarios with its out-of-the-box integration. Customers can increase the speed at which their business cycles are executed through integrated freight settlement with SAP ERP billing and invoicing.

What does SAP TMS do?

Mass Data Processing

The SAP Transportation Management module allows you to manage freight planning, visualize order details, and maps of transportation routes. It allocates interactive planning to carry out through mass processing

Document and Instruction Management

Create documents of transportation, print bills of shipping (road, sea, air), manage status, labels, forward instructions, and such. These instructions may contain freight forwarding orders (FWO), delivery-based transportation requirements (DTR), and sales order-based transportation requirements (OTR).

Order Management

By integrating SAP TMS with the SAP ERP system using the PI interface, orders and deliveries can be automatically converted into transportation requirements. The LSP Forwarding Order can be created manually in a standalone

SAP Transportation Management.

Transportation Analysis & Planning

The overall transportation can be elaborately analyzed and planned for a smooth goods movement and delivery. The planning processes in the TMS module are as follows:

• Transportation cockpit that allows visibility of the goods
• Planning and optimization of the transportation process
• Goods carrier selection
• Tendering orders for potential suppliers

Executing Transportation

Using SAP TMS, companies can carry out the following essential tasks easily:

• Integrating SAP Transport Management with SAP Event Management (EM) for tracking the transportation and alerts.
• Integrating dangerous goods management within the SAP ecosystem to ensure health and safety.
• Integrating SAP Transportation Management with SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM).
• Producing delivery documents in SAP ERP system.
• Producing shipping documents in SAP ERP or in other systems through interfaces.
• Printing the document
• Analyze every transportation document to adjust business processes.

Freight Settlement

The Freight settlement process in the SAP TMS module allows the following:

• Defining freight or forwarding agreements.
• Defining transportation charges.
• Producing settlement documents.
• Integrating the settlement documents to SAP ERP.
• Integrating customer billing to SAP ERP.

Business Benefits of SAP Transportation Management

• Can be utilized by any industry- retail, manufacturing, service-based, and so on.
• Reduces the transportation costs significantly.
• Carefully and efficiently analyses and plans the transportation requirements
• Easy freight settlements
• Effective logistics fulfillment
• Improved visibility and responsiveness
• Effective end-to-end order management (From placing the order to its delivery)

SAP Transportation Management brings in goods transportation planning and execution solutions for easy delivery and settlements anywhere across the globe. For retail businesses, companies can integrate SAP TMS with SAP Hybris Commerce to offer the order-to-delivery lifecycle.