DL05. Sales Order Scheduling with S/4HANA TM 2023 FPS02

In the current fast-paced business landscape, ensuring timely and reliable delivery dates is essential for maintaining customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. SAP Transportation Management (TM), integrated with SAP S/4HANA, offers a resilient solution for accurate sales order scheduling. This article delves into how SAP TM enhances sales order scheduling, providing a seamless and reliable process.

The Importance of Sales Order Scheduling Based on TM

Sales order scheduling is a vital part of the order-to-cash process, ensuring that delivery dates are dependable and meet customer expectations. With Transportation Management (TM) in S/4HANA, the scheduling process has been transformed. Previously, scheduling relied on the Logistics Execution Transportation (LE-TRA) route, which required maintaining transport-related master data in both LE-TRA and TM. This often led to discrepancies in delivery dates due to different heuristics used by each component.

The new TM-based scheduling leverages the transport network and heuristics within TM, ensuring that transport-related master data is maintained only once. This integration allows for more accurate and reliable delivery dates, enhancing customer satisfaction and streamlining the scheduling process. Note that TM-based scheduling can only be used if there is no route used in the sales order.

Features of TM Based Scheduling

• Integrated Scheduling: Utilizes TM's transport network and heuristics for accurate delivery date calculation.
• Backward and Forward Scheduling: Calculates requested picking dates and material availability dates, ensuring alignment with Available-to-Promise (ATP) checks.
• Single Master Data Maintenance: Reduces redundancy by maintaining transport-related data only in TM.

TM based scheduling provides more accurate delivery dates during sales order entry by incorporating detailed transportation information, such as scheduled departure times and location opening hours. TM acts as a scheduling provider within the Business Process Scheduling (BPS) framework, enhancing the accuracy of sales order scheduling.

System Settings and BPS Schema

A BPS schema is used to delegate Transportation Management (TM) for Business Process Scheduling (BPS) activities in sales documents.

Activating BPS Logic for Sales Documents

You can activate the BPS logic for sales documents with TM by defining a TM control key to determine the BPS schema used for scheduling.

Configuring TM based Scheduling within the BPS Schema

TM based scheduling can be configured in two ways within the BPS schema:

• Determination of Transportation Durations for BPS-Based Scheduling: TM provides only durations of activities (e.g., from transportation lanes or default routes), and BPS handles the scheduling.

• Routing and Scheduling of Transportation Requirements: TM drives scheduling and delivers specific dates and duration of activities, incorporating detailed information such as operating times of locations, schedule departures, waiting time at intermediate location, etc.

Defining Routing Methods

In the 'transportation duration determination profile' and the 'requirement routing profile', you can define a sequence of multiple routing methods. The system processes these methods sequentially, and once a method determines a result, it is not changed by subsequent methods.

The available methods are:

1. Default Route Determination: Searches for default routes and copies routing information and travel durations into the result. If any stage lacks a duration, subsequent methods can determine it.
2. Lane, Distance, and Duration Determination (LDDD): Searches for durations using lane, distance, and duration determination, first checking transportation lanes and then using straight-line determination as a fallback.
3. Straight-Line Determination: Calculates straight-line distances and durations based on the speed of the default means of transport.
4. Network Path Determination (Introduced with FPS02): Determines a path from the source to the destination based on the transportation network, considering transshipment locations and schedules, and taking into account parameters like search depth and prioritization of shortest duration or distance.

Assigning Profiles for Scheduling

Profiles for scheduling are assigned to a control key, which determines the activation of sales documents for TM planning or TM-based scheduling. Depending on this profile assignment, the system determines the type of scheduling to be used in a sales document.

Scenario Testing

In a tested scenario where TM integration was used only for sales order scheduling, TM delegated scheduling delivered the date and time of activities. TM-based scheduling provided the date and time for shipping activities in sales order schedule lines.

Review Availability Check Result (RACR) Screen

If you have activated advanced Available-to-Promise (aATP), information about the used profile, default routes, schedules, and intermediate stops from the routing and scheduling modules of TM is displayed on the Review Availability Check Result (RACR) screen.

Test Cockpits for Simulating Scheduling

S/4HANA TM has introduced TRS test cockpits to simulate transportation routing and scheduling and test your configuration (Transaction: /SCMTMS/TEST_PLN_TRS).

This cockpit provides a comprehensive environment for testing transportation requirement routing and scheduling. It allows users to simulate various scenarios and ensure that the scheduling process meets business requirements. In the result details screen, you can see that TM has delivered scheduling results with the duration of each activity.

There is also a test cockpit available to simulate the determination of network paths and analyze the results.

Addressing Scheduling Challenges

Is your organization facing challenges with maintaining accurate delivery dates due to discrepancies between LE-TRA and TM scheduling? Implementing TM based scheduling in S/4HANA can streamline the scheduling process, reduce data maintenance efforts, and improve delivery reliability.

Business Benefits:

• Improved Accuracy: A single source of truth for transport-related data ensures consistent and accurate delivery dates.
• Customer Satisfaction: Reliable delivery dates enhance customer trust and satisfaction.
• Operational Efficiency: Reduced redundancy in data maintenance and streamlined scheduling processes.

Conclusion

TM-based scheduling in S/4HANA offers significant improvements over traditional LE-TRA route-based scheduling. By leveraging TM's transport network and heuristics, businesses can achieve more accurate and reliable delivery dates, improving overall operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

This article is based on my testing and observations from the S/4HANA TM 2023 FPS02 release. Thank you for your attention!