Enablement of Company code in Freight order of Transportation Management in S/4HANA 2020 Release

SAP Transportation management ( TM ) supports planning and execution of freight management. SAP TM handles primarily logistic data and not much of financial data (or transactions). Hence , TM did not have any field or value for company code till S/4HANA 1909 release. Now, SAP has enabled ‘Company code’ in Freight order , freight booking and service order in S/4HANA 2020 release. My present blog is to discuss on the benefits for enabling company code in freight order in TM.

A typical Order to cash flow with embedded TM in S/4HANA is shown in below image. TM has the functionality of calculation of freight cost (known as charge calculation in TM) and creation of Purchase order to the freight carrier. This Purchase order is created in ERP or S/4HANA core and the information of company code is needed in that purchase order for the financial postings. Till S/4HANA 1909 release, this information of Company code is derived from the configuration (IMG->Transportation management->Settlement->Freight settlement->Integration for financial posting->Assign purchasing information for posting) as shown in below image at the time of creation of purchase order in ERP or S/4HANA core. Note that a plant is mapped to a unique company code in SAP.

This derivation of plant or company code at a later stage of the flow (i.e at the time of creation of purchase order) has limitation , if carrier purchase order needs to be created in multiple plants or if tax regulation needs multiple plants. As the FSD type (Freight settlement document type) is uniquely assigned to plant as in above image, multiple FSD types are required to meet the requirement of multiple plants (or company codes) for carrier purchase order. SAP provided a BADI as stated in note 2583557 for an workaround.

SAP has now eliminated the above limitation by enabling ‘Procuring company code’ in freight order (freight booking and service order) and freight settlement document as shown in below process flow diagram and screenshots of freight order & freight settlement document from S/4HANA 2020 release.

System automatically populates the value of ‘Procuring company code’ from the Organization unit assigned to the purchasing organization in PPOME and the same is copied to the freight settlement document (FSD).

System can also check the unique mapping of ERP company code with the organization unit (company code) from PPOME and displays the below error message in case of mismatch .

The above check is carried out if the freight order type is set for ‘Basic additional checks’ in its customizing as shown in below image.

This enhancement enables the

i) determination of plant and company code more flexibly instead of depending on the freight settlement document type

ii) reduction of the requisite number of FSD types for multiple plants

iii) simplifies freight settlement process

This blog is based on my personal insights, tests and observation in S/4HANA 2020 release. Will appreciate your comment and feedback.