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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.
- Identify the pain points and bottlenecks with your current solution.
- Outline wish-to-improve points and turn them into a requirement list.
- Understand what functionalities SAP TM can provide and how the functional requirements can be satisfied.
- 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.
- 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.
32 results
Enhancing the Efficiency and Sustainability of Global Supply Chains with DescartesJan 31, 2024 — In the current business environment, marked by intense competition, escalating customer expectations, frequent resource shortages, and significant economic challenges, it's imperative for organizations to effectively manage their supply chains. This requires a holistic strategy, incorporating efficient delivery, improved customer experience, fleet optimization, strict cost management, and enhancing the performance of both drivers and vehicles. At the same time, companies must adopt advanced, innovative technological tools and solutions to support and elevate their supply chain operations. Utilizing state-of-the-art technology for real-time monitoring and smooth communication, businesses can focus on customer satisfaction, offering better delivery options and transparency.
Descartes Systems Group is a company that specializes in providing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for transportation and logistics. The company primarily concentrates on the transportation of goods, as well as communication and data management within the transportation and logistics industry.
7 minute read
Minimizing Route Optimization Run Times in SAP TMMar 2, 2023 — The Vehicle Scheduling and Routing (VSR) optimizer in SAP Transportation Management (TM) is used extensively for vehicle route optimization. Like every other route optimization solution, heuristic leverages various modeling parameters to develop optimal routes. However, route optimization heuristics are computationally intense, and therefore, model run times are typically long. This article discusses three approaches that can be used to reduce the model run time:
• Minimizing model complexity
• Build sub-models
• Leverage multi-CPU core systems
3 minute read
Supply Chain Resiliency with Dan CicerchiJan 24, 2022 — There has undoubtedly been a cry to transform the way we run and plan our supply chains to avoid running into such massive and consecutive supply chain disruptions in the future. This is where the focus on supply chain resiliency stems. While many different strategies are being planned by organizations across the globe, there is no doubt that technology will play its usual role of an enabler to help manage these disruptions better in the future. In this video, SAPinsider and expert from Descrates discuss how technology can help build supply chain resiliency.
1 minute read
Agriculture Commodity SchedulingMar 10, 2020 — Agriculture commodities follow a complex supply chain and are influenced by global demand and inventory levels along with local weather, harvest conditions, and freight availability. The commodities are traded, hedged, stored, and speculated in most of the world. The commodity therefore transacts through multiple entities before it is ultimately consumed by processing units for end-customer use. Learn how to integrate SAP Trader's and Scheduler's Workbench and SAP Transportation Management to provide much-needed agility to deal with market dynamics and changing contractual positions.
9 minute read
American Snack Company Saves Millions by Improving SAP TM User ExperienceFeb 25, 2020 — Approximately 23% of SAP customers currently use SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM) according to SAPinsider's "Transforming the Intelligent Supply Chain" research. This makes it the second most popular SAP supply chain product after SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (SAP APO). SAP customers that use SAP TM are 83% more likely to focus on digital transformation of the supply chain than those who do not use SAP TM. Some businesses, however, do not at first see the results they expect when using tools like SAP TM — for instance, one American multi-national snack company used SAP TM as part of a digital transformation, but did not realize the expected business value. Why is this? To answer this question, and address the root cause, the company turned to Knoa Software.
4 minute read
Logistics and SCM: Case study: How United Sugars mastered rail functionality with SAP TM 9.3 and automated 90% of its end-to-end transportation processesMar 5, 2019 — Discover how United Sugars (USC) was able to effectively leverage SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM) to plan and manage transportation requirements for its distribution channels. SCM2017_Perala_Casestudyhowunitedsugarsmastered Roger Perala If you have comments about this article or publication, or would like to submit an article idea, please contact the editor.
1 minute read
Automatic Generation of Invoices for Transport and Surcharge per Shipping ValueAug 30, 2017 — In sales flows in supply chain execution, a sales order may require several outbound delivery documents for the volume (dimensions) of an item. These delivery documents can be delivered in different shipment documents. Learn how to split the invoice automatically for each transport document using invoice documents generated automatically from the shipment document. This process […]
11 minute read
Optimizing Supply Chain Visibility with SAP Transportation ManagementFeb 1, 2017 — Obtaining transparency across today’s rapidly evolving and highly complex supply chain is essential in establishing a streamlined, cooperative, well-oiled supply chain machine. However, there are many organizational challenges to overcome, such as a persistent reliance on manual tendering processes, inability to ensure timely interactions with carriers due to a lack of an effective collaboration platform, […]
20 minute read
Maximize Supply Chain Transparency and Gain Control of Freight Spend with the Latest SAP TM CapabilitiesSep 1, 2016 — 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 […]
24 minute read