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Author's profile photo Michael Haase

How to set up combination resources in SAP Transportation Management

When using SAP Transportation management in a road scenario, you’re able to do load planning and VSR optimization for your vehicles such as trucks and trailers. Thereby, you can do the load planning of your items on the truck and on its attached trailers separately, according to the parameters you provide. But when it comes to VSR optimization, you obviously want to plan your truck together with its attached trailers as one entity.

With the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release, this is improved by introducing the ‘Combination Resource’. This is a new logical object representing a truck and its attached trailers. With that, you’re now able to do the VSR optimization for a fixed truck-trailer combination in an easy way. But you still have the possibility to do load planning on the individual resources.

The following settings in the system are necessary to use a combination resource:

  • Customizing

In customizing, you define on the level of vehicle groups and vehicle types which combinations of respective individual resources are allowed to be defined as a combination resource. Therefore, the existing customizing activity ‘Define Equipment Groups and Equipment Types’ has been enhanced:

You enter the new dialog ‘Maintain Combination Resource’ with a vehicle group and vehicle type:

Now, you specify the combination resource by providing the vehicle groups/types of the individual resources in the sequence as they get attached. The sequence number can be chosen arbitrary as long as the vehicle group/type of the active vehicle has the lowest sequence number.

  • Master data:

Here, you maintain the vehicle which is the active resource (e.g. the truck) of a combination resource.

This can be done in two ways:

    • You can take over the settings from the customizing based on the vehicle group/type of the vehicle. To do so, you press the button ‘Copy Equipment Group/Type Data’ and those settings will appear in tab ‘Combination Resource’. Those settings could now still be overwritten.
    • Or you can maintain the combination resource manually in tab ‘Combination Resource’.

A checkbox on the resource data indicates that it’s part of a combination resource.

 

Having maintained this, the combination resource can now be used in your transportation planning processes:

In the freight order,  the combination resource will then appear as the active vehicle with its individual resources as local subitems.

If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to use the comment section below. I’ll be happy to get in contact with you!

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      11 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Eike Exner
      Eike Exner

      Thanks for the explanation.

      One question regarding TM-EWM integration when using this.

      How would these combination reflect in EWM when:

      1 FO with

      1 Active Vehicle Resource and

      2 Passive Trailers

      is being send as delivery proposal to S4 and delivery is transmitted to EWM

      Would it create 1 TU for all of these together? Or would it create:

      1 TU for FO

      2 TU for passive trailers?

       

      Thank you

      Eike

      Author's profile photo Michael Haase
      Michael Haase
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Eike,

       

      Thanks for commenting!

      It would be only one delivery in LE. I'm not an expert in EWM but I would assume only one TU as well. To my knowledge, the combination resource has only an effect during the transportation  planning but will not lead to any splitting of documents.

       

      Best regards,

      Michael

      Author's profile photo Eike Exner
      Eike Exner

      Hello Michael,

       

      thanks for the answer and the clarification.

      Have a great day.

      Eike

      Author's profile photo Nikhil Dogra
      Nikhil Dogra

      Hello Michael

       

      I am facing an issue while I maintain just the Vehicle resource in the Combination resource. I am unable to save the resource.

       

      The requriement is to create various resources with various trailer combinations.

      Is there anything missing? It seems like this was only possible wth Vehicle Group and Type in the combination resource tab.

       

      Thanks

      Nikhil Dogra

      Author's profile photo Michael Haase
      Michael Haase
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Nikhil,

       

      Thanks for your comment! It took a while to reply due to a vacation 🙂

      From what I see, the issue is that the combination resource has the same name as the individual resource which is the active one.

      So, the combination resource is a new resource which has one active resource and one or more passive resources attached. Therefore, the combination resource needs to have a name different to any attached individual resources.

       

      Best regards,

      Michael

      Author's profile photo Nikhil Dogra
      Nikhil Dogra

      Hi Michael

       

      Thanks for your reply.

      It is working now.

       

      Thanks

      Nikhil Dogra

      Author's profile photo Georgiy Savlaev
      Georgiy Savlaev

      Hi Michael,

       

      Am I right, that I need to set up in active resource1 in tab "Combination resource" the combination of active resource2 and passive resource3? Why so?

       

      Regards,

      Georgiy

      Author's profile photo Michael Haase
      Michael Haase
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Georgiy,

      You mean why there are different active resources?

      This is because active resource2 is just the truck, without trailer. And active resource1 is the logical unit of truck and a trailer. That's why they can not be the same.

      Best regards,

      Michael

      Author's profile photo Zsolt Szigetvari
      Zsolt Szigetvari

      Based on this post am I reight, that there is no standard way to combine a unique active vehicle with a unique passive vehicle (like in case of an LSP scenario) as with the combination resource we will have 3 resources? 1 combination, that has a unique active and a unique passive).

      Author's profile photo Michael Haase
      Michael Haase
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Zsolt,

      Quite frankly, I'm not that super expert in transportation planning knowing all bits and pieces.

      If you mean with 'combine' the master data perspective, I don't know any standard way to do so. That's why we introduced the combination resource, ending up with the 3 resources you mention. But when it then comes to the planning, you have the possibility to plan just on one resource as a logical unit, the combination resource. So, overall this is an improvement in the process.

      Best regards,

      Michael

      Author's profile photo Zsolt Szigetvari
      Zsolt Szigetvari

      hi Michael,

       

      Thanks for the reply, it's clear now. Just one more thing. In standard there is no way to handle a trailer as default trailer to an active vehicle, just like you can assign a default driver to a vehicle?