SAP Transportation Management


What Is Transportation Management?

Transportation Management involves managing the transport operations from freight carrier selection to route mapping to fuel costing and track and trace of goods as they are transported throughout the supply chain. It also involves the regular maintenance of vehicles. Companies also rely on transportation management systems (TMS) that exchange data with warehouses and distribution centers for order coordination.

What is the benefit of implementing transportation management solutions? In today’s fast-paced business landscape, companies want to streamline their operations and automate mundane tasks that can consume time and resources doing them manually. These systems are also critical for data visibility into shipping processes and customer engagement.

What Is Transportation Management?

Transportation Management involves managing the transport operations from freight carrier selection to route mapping to fuel costing and track and trace of goods as they are transported throughout the supply chain. It also involves the regular maintenance of vehicles. Companies also rely on transportation management systems (TMS) that exchange data with warehouses and distribution centers for order coordination.

What is the benefit of implementing transportation management solutions? In today’s fast-paced business landscape, companies want to streamline their operations and automate mundane tasks that can consume time and resources doing them manually. These systems are also critical for data visibility into shipping processes and customer engagement.

SAP Transportation Management Solution

SAP offers its own transportation management solution. Capabilities of SAP TM include:

  • Rate automation to effectively choose your logistics provider
  • Synchronization of sales and order scheduling for on-time customer delivery
  • Pallet building with rules-based optimization
  • Visualization tool for planning loads.

Is SAP TM a good choice for your freight operation? Yanpeng Tan, Senior SAP Transportation Management Consultant, Novigo, shared several steps with SAPinsider about evaluating the solution.

  1. Identify the pain points and bottlenecks with your current solution.
  2. Outline wish-to-improve points and turn them into a requirement list.
  3. Understand what functionalities SAP TM can provide and how the functional requirements can be satisfied.
  4. Conduct an SAP TM workshop and we strongly recommend a proof-of-concept approach to view how SAP TM works and get an idea of how the implementation will be executed.
  5. Draw a high-level solution by incorporating inputs from different stakeholders.

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders

  • Optimizing Supply Chain Visibility with SAP Transportation Management. In this Q&A featuring Yanpeng Tan, Senior SAP Transportation Management Consultant, Novigo, learn how to gain greater efficiencies in both carrier management and tendering processes with SAP Transportation Management. According to Tan, “SAP TM provides sophisticated functionality to manage contract information for each individual carrier in the SAP TM space, and it will be used to calculate cost for each freight shipment. SAP TM supports interactive tendering for daily operation via a collaboration portal.”
  • A Look at Some Enhancements Under the SAP Transportation Management Hood. Rajesh Ray, who leads the SAP SCM product area at IBM Global Business Services, and Sanket Kulkarni, Solution Architect at Accenture Services Private Limited, examine the functionalities of SAP TM, including truck load management, strategic freight procurement, and collaboration portal. Read this article to learn about industry-specific functionalities of rail car, ocean carrier, and parcel, as well as integration functionalities with other SAP modules.

Other vendors in the transportation management space include: GoSCM, SaM Solutions, and Odyssey Logistics & Technology.

14 results

  1. Maximize Supply Chain Transparency and Gain Control of Freight Spend with the Latest SAP TM Capabilities

    Published: 01/September/2016

    Reading time: 24 mins

    Achieving increased transparency across today’s complex supply chains is a fundamental objective for many organizations. Gaining such visibility has proven to be a very real challenge impacting both operational efficiency and customer service levels. Equally important is the ability to effectively manage transportation costs, which is critical in achieving total efficiency across the entire supply…

  2. How to Use Collective Processing with Business Criteria to Create a Shipment Document

    Published: 30/August/2016

    Reading time: 9 mins

    The creation of a transport (shipment) document represents a very important step in the distribution chain. Generation of this document is based on numerous factors. Learn how using collective processing can help you save time when creating a shipment document. Key Concept Collective processing allows the generation of documents (shipment documents). This functionality enables you...…

  3. Live from SAPinsider Studio: Movado Discusses Upgrade From Legacy System to Integrated Shipping Solution

    The Movado Group’s Mitch Spaner, Senior Manager of Global IT Business Solutions, and Maria Carbone, Senior Manager of Distributed Shared Services, join SAPinsider Studio at the SCM 2016 event in Las Vegas along with Joseph Cabrera, Partner at ERP Integrated Solutions, to discuss their recent project to upgrade their legacy point shipping solution with ERP…

  4. How to Integrate Warehouse Processes with SAP TM for a Shipper Scenario

    Published: 27/January/2016

    Reading time: 36 mins

    Learn how to set up the integration between SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM), SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), and SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM). When a customer places an order to transport a product with pickup from a warehouse, end-to-end process integration between warehouse operations and execution, transportation planning, and the freight settlement (based on...…