Integration between SAP Agricultural Contract Management and SAP Transportation Management on SAP S/4HANA published

On November, 29th 2019 SAP proudly published a new product to integrate SAP Agricultural Contract Management and SAP Transportation Management on S/4HANA. The product is officially called ‘SAP S/4HANA, bulk transportation extension for SAP Agricultural Contract Management’.

For customers that use or plan to use Agricultural Contract Management there are huge benefits about the bulk extension to SAP Transportation Management such as:

• Higher degree of process automation for transportation planning processes that originate nominations
• Reduced costs for expediting and transportation as a result of early planning of transportation activities based on nominations
• Bidirectional visibility for trade-execution experts and transportation experts
• Ability to leverage standard processes and innovations from SAP TM, such as planning, scheduling, collaboration, and charge management
• Common logistical processes across multiple business units with or without SAP Agricultural Contract Management
• Early settlement of freight costs (based on nominations) and accurate and timely posting of accruals
• Settlement of freight costs and assignment to related trading contracts to improve profit calculation of trades

The benefits from above are mainly realized by the following integration points:

• Integration of SAP ACM nominations to SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM) application in an embedded S/4HANA environment
• Integration of execution information from a load data capture (LDC) to documents in SAP TM
• Distribution of freight costs to related trading contracts

A conceptual flowchart of the integration is shown below:

The following key aspects are most important for agricultural companies:

• Integration of nominations for both planned and unplanned nomination items – support for all key logistical processes originating from nominations such as purchases, sales, and stock transfers of items in various scenarios, including:
  • Third-party purchases
  • Third-party sales
  • Inter- and intracompany transfers
  • Back-to-back sales
  • Multi-buy sales
  • Diversions
• Integration of LDC with SAP TM so that all relevant execution data (loading or unloading data) is sent to execution documents in SAP TM, enabling use of actual data, such as for tracking and charge settlements:
  • In the above context, support for automated and manual matching and unmatching processes using a new freight-assignment work center
  • Support for customer returns as well, through integration of LDC
• Assignment of freight costs to the related trading contracts – support for the distribution of costs from SAP TM to nomination items and the settlement of freight costs to the related trading contracts that are integrated into revenue-recognition processes in the SAP Agricultural Contract Management application

Delivery of the above scope through the following functionality:

• • Tight integration among nomination items, freight units, and railcar units or among freight orders, bidirectional data, and status exchange
  • Status control from nomination to SAP TM documents
  • Visibility from the nomination into SAP TM documents regarding planning, scheduling, and status
  • Visibility from documents in SAP TM into the originating nomination items
  • Full support of SAP TM documents in the document flow in SAP Agricultural Contract Management
  • Integration of actual loading data from SAP Agricultural Contract Management to execution in SAP TM
  • Automated and manual matching and unmatching of load data capture documents to execution documents in SAP TM
  • Cost distribution to nomination items in freight orders and freight settlement documents in SAP TM
  • Creation and posting of settlement documents toward trading contracts

For more information about this great new product please have a look at help.sap.com/acmtm