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!