SAP S/4HANA 2023 and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition were released today.

Transportation Management delivers breathtaking innovations with this new release.
I am happy to share the latest and greatest with you in this blog.

Let’s start with the new integration capabilities.

With the new release we now support the Advanced Shipping and Receiving (Adv. SR) with a decentral EWM/TM system in an outbound scenario. In the figure below you can see how the supported scenario looks like:

Integration of S4HANA with S4HANA Standalone (EWM+TM)

Furthermore in the Adv. SR area we now also provide the Advanced Shipping & Receiving cockpit that can provide an overview of multiple (un)loading points of different freight orders. With this new Fiori App you can easily get an overview of the expected shipping and receiving activities for given selection criteria. You can select single or multiple sub-stops of a freight order and navigate from the Adv. SR Cockpit to the Load or Unload Freight Order App for details.

Advanced Shipping and Receiving Cockpit

You can learn more about Advanced Shipping and Receiving in the OpenSAP course SAP Logistics – Transformation from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA

We have not only improved the functionality around ASR processes. We have also improved the integration capabilities in the proven and established TU-based integration between EWM and TM. There are two new enhancements in this area. First, we now also support the visibility process to make a stock transport order visible for the inbound stop, which was introduced in SAP S/4HANA 2022 release. We now also support the freight unit reassignment from outbound to inbound delivery, so that the unloading instructions are automatically sent to the receiving plant.

Secondly, we have enabled departure reversal in the outbound process of the TU-based integration. This can be necessary because sometimes the warehouse staff wants to reverse the departure booked in the system (just as it is possible without the TM-EWM integration), for example if the departure has been booked too early by mistake although the truck has not left the location yet, or in case the departure has been booked too late.

There are also notable innovations in the area of master data.

We now support product-based commodity codes. What exactly does this mean? The calculation of subcontracting and transport costs is often based on commodity codes. Commodity codes are also very important for export business. Prior to this release, it was possible to use commodity codes based on product master data, but in the shipping business, commodity codes had to be entered manually.
Now we offer new customising settings and apps to assign products to commodity codes. This greatly reduces the maintenance effort. The newly introduced commodity code lists (e.g. STCC, NMFC) can be maintained mode and country specific and also support the validity period to support different versions. The commodity codes are then automatically retrieved in execution documents and can be used for follow-on processes such as subcontracting and fee calculation.

Usage of product classification for commodity codes in execution documents

There are many new enhancements in the Transport Network Master Data. I would like to mention two of these enhancements.

• Handling validity periods of geographical data
  Very often the use of geographic data is restricted to a certain validity period or not allowed at all by the provider of the geographic data. We have now extended the master data (location, lane, distance and duration buffer, schedule and default route) so that this legal restriction can be respected.
• Another topic to mention is that HANA Spatial Services is now also integrated with TomTom and ESRI.

There are countless new features in Package Building, Load Planning, Scheduling and Planning. There are so many innovations that I only want to highlight 6! of them, although there are many, many great ones.
First of all, a new free positioning load planning engine has been introduced.

The graph below shows the impact and comparison between the classic row-stack approach and the new free positioning approach. For load planning, the user is free to choose which load planning engine to use based on the scenario.

Free Positioning of Packages in a Truck

By using the new approach, much better utilisation of load planning can be achieved. Manual reworking of load planning can also be reduced.

Another brand new feature in Package Building & Load Planning is the support of Upright Cylinders.

Planning of Upright Containers with Free Positioning

The shape information of a product is taken from the material master data and passed to the Package Building Optimiser (PBO) for detailed packaging. As you can see in the picture above, this new capability allows for much better utilisation of the truck (or trailer or container).

A rather important topic is the introduction of the new Driver Time and Working Hours Constraints. In previous releases, legal restrictions were supported with approximate calculations. However, the new capabilities introduced with SAP S/4HANA 2023 take the functionality to a new level by supporting country-specific regulations such as driver times, breaks, daily and weekly rest periods. Embedded Vehicle Scheduling and Routing (VSR) takes these driving and working time restrictions into account to create an executable plan that includes scheduled breaks.

Rest periods and driving times are displayed in the Transportation Cockpit in various lists and hierarchies and are nicely visualised in the Gantt chart.

Rests shown as separate grey rectangles in Gantt chart

A very important topic is the new field configurability for the Transportation Cockpit.

In the past it was quite cumbersome to add new fields to the list of fields displayed in the lists and hierarchies of the Transportation Cockpit. This has now been completely redesigned so that, for example, custom-defined fields can be activated simply by selecting them in the customzing, rather than through a custom specific enhancement.

Selection of fields in the Field catalog and usage in the Transportation Cockpit

A number of new and editable fields have also been added, such as time windows and locations for the first and last stop of a freight unit, the paying company code of a freight unit stage, for freight bookings the port related cargo cut off and availability date & time, and the freight booking  Movement Type in Hierarchiesas well as CO2 Emissions fields.

These new features significantly improve the performance, usability and TCO of the implementation.

With SAP S/4HANA Release 2022, the creation of capacity documents based on groups has been introduced. This capability has been enhanced to take into account the capacity limits of the capacity documents.

Last but not least, another milestone is the support of greenhouse gas emissions (CO2) for road freight orders. GHG emissions are taken into account during automatic & manual planning, calculated in the freight order and finally distributed to the items.

How does this work in detail? Firstly, VSR Optimisation can take into account emission related factors to consider the impact of emissions and select the least emission generating solution based on the given inputs.

Display of Emissions during Planning

The calculation of emissions uses master data (equipment group & type) where the emission parameters for an empty and fully loaded truck are stored. These values are evaluated and the emissions are calculated per stage and aggregated to document level using a distance-weight based calculation of the truck.
In addition, actual emissions per stage can be reported.
On completion of a road transport order, the emissions are finally allocated to the items.

New Emissions Tab in the Road Freight Order

There are also many other innovations in the area of freight documents. I would like to briefly mention some of them below.

• Additional Details for Ad-Hoc Driver:
  We have enhanced the ad hoc (non-master data based) driver maintenance to support the storage of driver contact information and comply with data protection and privacy requirements.
  This makes it possible to store additional information about the driver (in particular the driver’s mobile phone number), making it much easier to contact the driver who may show up at your premises.
• Support of International Address Versions:
  If you ship to international countries, different address versions may be used in those countries, for example in Chinese, Cyrillic or Arabic characters. These international address versions are now supported in the location master, business partners and TM documents.
• Aggregated Text Propagation for SD/MM Texts:
  In the past, if you maintained transport-relevant texts in a sales or purchase document and consolidated several documents in a freight order, there was no logic to combine these texts. Now, logic has been introduced to concatenate transport-relevant texts in execution documents.

In the area of collaboration, a new app called Manage Charges for Freight Orders has been added for use by the service provider.

With this new application, the carrier or service provider can edit existing charge items or add new ones to the calculated charges proposed by the shipper. After sending the modified proposal, a dispute case is created and the shipper can accept the changes or create a counter-proposal to be sent back to the carrier until a final agreement on the charges is reached.

New Collaboration app for Managing Charges of Freight Orders

Another major enhancement is support for freight bookings in Business Networks for Logistics (BN4L). With SAP S/4HANA Release 2023, you can now also exchange your data with Business Networks for Logistics to collaborate with your service providers for better subcontracting and visibility. Learn more about BN4L here: SAP Business Network for Logistics

This is by no means all the news. There are at least three other big and very important topics that are relevant from an end-to-end perspective that I would like to highlight here.

The first innovation is planning and invoicing with normalised and additional normalised quantities (aka number of pallets and loading metres).

Transport requirements and capacities are often measured in terms of normalised (floor) space in trucks and containers, which must be taken into account in planning, calculation of charges, subcontracting, execution and invoicing. We have introduced normalised quantities (NLQ) and additional normalised quantities (ALQ) in the end-to-end process to support, for example, the number of pallets or loading metres.

Demands can be converted into normalised and additional normalised quantities and optimised into trucks or containers using these units of measurement.
NLQ and ALQ (e.g. number of pallets or loading metres) can be used in automatic and manual planning or in external planning carried out by the logistics service provider.

The EDI communication for subcontracting and the Advanced Shipping Notification (ASN) have been extended to use NLQ and ALQ.

A new calculation basis for NLQ and ALQ has also been introduced in the area of charge calculation, so that charges can be calculated and settled accordingly.

Planning, Execution and settlement based on number of pallets and loading meters

With this enhancement it is now possible to use the number of pallets or loading meters that are commonly used in an end-to-end transport process.

The second major innovation is the charging of service items to additional service providers.

Very often additional services (such as cleaning, fumigation or insurance) in an execution document are provided by an additional service provider. These services are usually only relevant for a specific stop. Previously, an additional service order could be created from an execution document, which increased the number of orders in the system and required additional effort.
Now it is possible to enter service items directly in the freight order item list, optionally specify the location of the service and assign the service item to an additional contracting party (service provider).

For these service items, separate charge calculations (using two newly introduced calculation bases for service time and service location), settlement documents and follow-on documents can be created in addition to the charges and settlement document relevant for freight charges and the main service provider.

As a result, it is now possible to settle settlement documents to multiple service providers for freight and based on additional services.

Creation of settlement documents for freight and service items from an additional service provider

The third major topic is charging and settling freight charges to an additional agreement party.
Until now, it was not possible to charge different stages of a freight document or items (e.g. container items) of a freight order to different agreement parties. It was also not possible to create header and stage/item based charges at the same time.
In contrast to previous releases, it is now possible to charge freight at all levels (header, stage, item) at the same time and to additional agreement parties.

Charging to additional agreement party on stages level

In terms of industry coverage and integration, we now support the Oil & Gas industry.

The purpose of integrating IS-Oil Shipments (TSW Nomination or TD Shipment) with TM was to take advantage of TM’s capabilities for freight calculation and settlement.
It is now possible to create freight units from TD shipments or TSW nominations and create freight orders. These freight orders can be used for standard follow-on processes such as charge calculation and settlement, and finally invoicing. We have achieved this new capability by introducing several new customising settings. Freight unit building has also been adapted so that it can be used by TSW nominations and TD shipments.
We have also implemented bi-directional visibility between TM and IS-Oil.

More information about this new type of integration can be found here: SAP Oil & Gas (IS-Oil Downstream): SAP Oil & Gas (IS-Oil Downstream)

• What’s New Viewer
• SAP TM Product Page on sap.com
• SAP Community for Transportation Management
• SAP Transportation Management Group on LinkedIn