Customers are demanding better services and products faster, and managing the different pieces of the logistics and transportation puzzle is becoming a game of strategy for companies, where the stakes are survival in a competitive market. To meet customers’ high expectations — and to stand out among a crowded field of competitors — transportation organizations must develop leaner operations. SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM), an application that encompasses a wide variety of transportation activities, can provide the tools to keep up with customer demands and trim down inefficiencies, all while providing clear insights into transportation processes to ensure stakeholder support across the supply chain.

Lean Logistics

SAP TM can help logistics organizations become leaner by reducing complexity, and by streamlining and integrating logistics within business networks. Developing lean logistics means you need to continually improve processes, where you constantly analyze and define further improvement actions for your transportation processes.

With SAP TM, you not only can establish and develop efficient transportation processes, but you also can better analyze them. SAP TM provides the necessary analytics for further process improvement actions and information for decisions so you can determine alternatives that can save you money and put less of a burden on resources. 

Solving the Buy-In Puzzle

Outside of its standard transportation process functionality, SAP TM is also equipped with comprehensive transportation analytics. Transportation analytics can provide valuable insights, such as:

• Supplier scorecards for use in negotiations with carriers
• On-time tracking of shipments
• Analysis of actual versus planned freight cost
• Routing guide compliance, allocations, and business share maintenance improvement

The information gained from transportation analytics within SAP TM can provide transparency into current transportation processes as well as reveal areas for improvement, such as how to move toward leaner logistics. With this kind of information available, user buy-in becomes much less of a problem because users can leverage these insights to improve so many parts of the transportation management process.

You can also use SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) to assist your analysis of transportation activities. Known primarily for its extract, transform, and load (ETL) abilities, including building data models and loading and monitoring data, SAP BW also allows you to create dashboards and more interactive web and Microsoft Excel-based reports that you can use to analyze transportation data at any level of granularity.

Putting the Pieces Together

Transportation analytics with SAP TM is an integral part of Novigo’s implementation approach. It allows customers to properly assess the functions of their logistics and transportation processes, determine where improvements can be made, and use that analysis to gain stakeholder buy-in. The analytics capabilities in SAP TM can also aid companies in becoming leaner to more effectively respond to the needs of their customer base.

For more information on putting the pieces together and implementing SAP Transportation Management, visit www.novigo.com.