Copy functionality in resource master data of SAP TM

[Michael_Haase]

Dear friends of SAP TM,

When you do your transportation planning in SAP Transportation Management, the available resources play a central role, obviously. Regarding resources, you can have vehicles like trucks, vessels and railcars. But besides, a resource in SAP TM can be a transportation unit like a container or also a handling resource like a dolly or a forklift.

When you maintain the master data of your resources, you might have wondered about the mystical copy button, marked in the following screenshot:

In this article, the functionality of this copy button is explained.

At first, the difference and relation between equipment and resource needs to be understood.

In customizing, you can maintain your equipment by creating equipment groups and associated equipment types for transportation units, handling resources and vehicles:

Thereby, the equipment type has the basic characteristics of certain types of transportation units, handling resources and vehicles.

Let's create for instance a vehicle type ZMH_SEMI in vehicle group ZMH:

Here, the vehicle group ZMH represents all the trucks in my fleet. And the vehicle type ZMH_SEMI is more specific to represent all the semi-trucks, with all relevant attributes.

Now, a vehicle resource is a concrete instance of a vehicle group/type. Means, when having maintained the basic attributes of my semi-trucks as vehicle type, I will now maintain every physical semi-truck in my fleet as vehicle resource. Therefore, the basic attributes of the vehicle type are taken over to each vehicle resource. The specific data of the physical semi-trucks can then be added in the vehicle resource, such as the plate number.

As an example, I create my first semi-truck ZMH_SEMI_1:

After pressing enter, you can see, that all data from the vehicle type has been taken over from customizing. And at next, I will now maintain the resource specific data of the semi-truck ZMH_SEMI_1. Or, I can also change the data which has been copied from the vehicle type which serves as a kind of default. Let's say for instance, one specific semi-truck has been adapted with an additional unit inside compared to all other semi-trucks of this vehicle type.

But wait a second…what is it now about the copy button…the data has been taken over already on pressing enter…?

Imagine one of the following cases, which can always occur:

• You need to change the vehicle type of the vehicle resource as the customizing changed or the truck has been re-labeled to another physical instance of another vehicle type….or whatever.


• You have changed something in the vehicle type data by mistake.

Then, by pressing the button 'copy', the data of the vehicle resource's vehicle type is loaded from customizing.

In the example, now the new vehicle type ZMH_TRUCK is maintained, which has different physical properties:

You see, that after pressing the button 'copy', the data has been adjusted to the new vehicle type. And this works only when pressing the button 'copy', not already after 'enter', so the user needs to be very sure about overwriting the maintained data!

So as you can see, the button 'copy' ensures, that the data of the maintained vehicle type is always loaded from customizing as default for the vehicle resource. Just be careful, as all your changes on purpose to the default data from the vehicle type will be overwritten!

Hope this helps you in maintaining your fleet properly. Please feel free to add comments!

Best regards,

Michael