Monday Knowledge Snippet (MKS) – 63 TM 9.3 Load Planning: Color Items by Weight

Today I want to introduce a small feature, that can help to better analyze and understand the result of the automatic load planning in TM using the 3-D Visualization (provided by SAP Visual Business). One important aspect of planning the load of a truck / trailer is of course the weight of the to-be loaded ietms (pallets, boxes, …). This weight influences where the optimizer can place the item within the resource, how it can be stacked, and so on. When looking at the load plan, it sometimes is hard and cumbersome to figure this out. To support the analysis better, it is now possible to color the items displayed in the load plan 3-D visualization. Before this, it was already possible to color them by ID, product, start, or destination location, and stackability.

To activate this feature, it is required to define weight groups under ‘Define Layouts for 3D Load Plan’:

Under the Weight Groups, you find the weight classes with the specific attributes to define the lower and upper weight limit and the to-be used color. Of course the deliverd standard weight classes can be adjusted.

Those weight groups can be used in multiple layouts and are therefore a seperate definition. They are assigned to the Layout in the layout header under ‘Weight Class Profile’. Having done that, the function must also be available in the scene context menu. This is defined under the Context Menu that is assigned to the layout.

If all of this is setup (and it should be using the standard SAP layout), you can find this funtion in the 3-D scene:

Selecting this function, the displayed scene changes:

The load plan list also shows the colors, so you can relate quickly to the items displayed.

Hope this can help getting the best and desired load plan results.