Monday Knowledge Snippet (MKS) – 35 Simplify the Network: Rough Planning

Setting up the Transportation Network for a planning scenario is easy if you know how:

http://scn.sap.com/community/scm/transportation-management/blog/2012/10/08/monday-knowledge-snippet-mks–16-on-the-fly-scenario-building-on-the-tm-90-geo-map

http://scn.sap.com/community/scm/transportation-management/blog/2012/10/08/monday-knowledge-snippet-mks–17-tm-90-path-finder

Nevertheless we strive to make it as easy as possible. In the past it was required to have a valid connection for each stage to ship stuff using one or multiple transshipments. Such a valid connection could be a transportation lane, schedule, or booking having concrete information how this stage would be executed. Planning is especially interested in a transit duration to calculate a transportation plan. Depending on the planning scenario it might not be necessary to have a detailed planning for example for the pre- and on-carriage at a certain point in time. This is the case when the main stage (ocean, air maybe) needs to be planned in advance, but the truck pre- and on-carriage planning is done later and even by a different user or organisation. To cover this in the past it was required to setup transportation lanes and involve resources, even though a pure and simplified transit duration would do the job.

Since SAP TM 9.0 it is now possible to setup such a scenario saving some master data definitions by the usage of the rough planning option. When defining the transshipment location assignment, there is a new field ‘Rough Planning Duration’ that holds the information for the optimization. Taking a simple example: The airport in Frankfurt can be reached within 5 hours when shipping goods from Berlin. In reality this would most likely be done on Transportation Zone level (the airport Frankfurt can be reached from any location in Germany within let’s say 8 hours; of course this can be as detailed as required).

By setting this duration, the assignment can possibly be used for a rough cut planning. As the transspiment location assignment can of course be valid for multiple different scenarios, it is required to tell the optimization if or if not a more detailed info shall be taken into consideration here.

For the concrete planning scenario the planning profile is defining this behaviour in the section for the optimizer settings:

You can pick out of 3 different behaviours:

So now all you need for example to cover a scenario like Warehouse -> Airport X -> Airport Y -> Customer are 2 transshipment location assignments and an air schedule in between. No lane Warehouse -> Airport X, no lane Airport Y -> Customer, no resources.

As always, I only point to new options and explain it roughly. Carefully read the detailed documentation to understand the optimization behaviour and possible effects for each setting.