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.