Transportation Planning

Transportation planning is the second step for order fulfilment from a planning point of view. It is either executed in batch mode several times per day after creating the deliveries or in an interactive mode by the transportation planners. Both delivery creation and transport planning are usually responsibilities of the warehouse as explained in chapter 6, though there might be dedicated transportation planners for the latter task. The first step towards execution is the creation of the delivery. At this point in time an ATP check is carried out again – usually with a much more restricted scope (i.e. stock only). Optionally deliveries (and other documents as stock transfer orders and returns) might be grouped to a shipment to make the execution of the shipping easier. The objective of transportation planning is to group the deliveries into shipments. The challenge in creating the shipments is to minimise the effort – i.e. the number of the shipments and the length of the shipments – while taking

the due dates,

the calendars of the customers (for loading and unloading),

the capacity restriction of the vehicles (i.e. how much can be loaded into a vehicle),

the vehicle availability (i.e. if there are not enough vehicles available) and

incompatibilities (e.g. of the goods or locations).

into consideration. To solve this problem TP/VS offers an optimisation tool. The result of the transportation planning is the creation of a shipment in SAP APO™. The shipment is a document which has a link to the included documents but does not replace them. Accordingly a shipment is not relevant for requirements planning and does not show up in the product view.