Deviating delivery address in purchase order creates one time location in TM integration

Dear friends of SAP TM,

When you order goods from your supplier, you might have the use case that the delivery address differs from the default address of your plant. May be the recipient is in another building as usual or whatsoever.

The question is then, how TM deals with that deviating address from the purchase order as transportation planning in TM always needs a respective location. But in our case, the actual destination location differs from the location of the plant. The answer are the so-called one time locations. In the following, it’s explained what that means in detail.

At first we need to deal with the basic question, how the destination location is derived when the purchase order is integrated with TM.

And the logic is as follows:

• If a shipping point is maintained for the provided plant and storage location, take the location of this shipping point.
• Otherwise, the location of the plant is taken

But let’s bring now a deviating address into the play:

In this exemplary purchase order, the house number has changed. And as the delivery address now deviates from the regular address of plant and/or shipping point, the above logic is overruled. In that case, we always create a new location with this address during TM integration, the so-called one time location:

This is a ‘regular’ location with location type 1021 (business partner) which is always the default type for one time locations. The only difference to a ‘manually created location’ is one tiny flag in database table /SAPAPO/LOC:

(If you search this flag in transaction /SCMTMS/LOC3…you won’t find it.)

But apart from that, this location can from now on be used for any process within SAP TM or i.e. be maintained with additional data. And so do we use it here when planning the transport for the example above:

You might wonder about this strange name ‘821’. This is because the name is derived from an internal number range. You have the possibility to adjust the name to your needs in a BAdI as explained in this blog post.

As the name implies, many of those one time locations might be used only one single time for a special purpose. Means, it surely makes sense to consider some kind of house-keeping to clean up the location master data regularly. This has to be done manually by setting the deletion flag and running the report /SAPAPO/DELETE_LOCATIONS as the system can never now, whether those locations are actually not used any longer, of course.

Hope this is a piece of useful information for you. I appreciate any comments!

Best regards,

Michael