Vehicle resources to track dropped carriers' trailers in yard

[Former Member]

Hi,

We are investigating the fit of SAP TM to meet the client's business needs, and I am not 100% it answers one the key requirements to offer visibility of external carriers' trailers left in the yard (with assignment of carrier, license plate number, the trailers are dropped by the carriers for a few days & the client decides when they load them) and offer the ability to manually assign a freight order to a specific vehicle.

They want to be able to easily add a trailer (carrier and number info) once it arrives in the yard, display the list of trailers in the yard, manually assign a trailer to a freight order (and not automatically by the optimizer) and ideally automatically remove the trailer from the yard once it ships (which I guess would be standard with a vehicle resource assigned to a FO).

I have implemented TPVS 10 years ago but we had vehicle resources only generic, not that specific, and I lost track of the new TM functionalities.

Thank you !

Delphine

[Former Member]

Hi Delphine,

Yes, book the event from ERP or directly on the trailer document to close it when you do no have on Freight Order attachted.
If you have an freight order attachted, Book the regular events on the FO and propagate to the TU when you have an EM implementation which supports this behaviour.

Best Regards,

Sander

[Former Member]

Thanks Sander and Benno!
So you are both pointing to the same solution of using trailer unit document....

As there are multiple sites, and each needs visibility of the dropped trailers in the yard, I guess it would be possible to create trailer unit documents with a location assigned, and display only those in the transportation cockpit along with the location's FU's...

Ad transportation execution happens in SAP ERP, it means we trigger from ERP to Event manager the Departure event (as last Expected Event) to close the trailer unit document, is that the idea ?

Bennom, I am not sure what you mean by 'subcontracting is not possible so you will have to create a freight order for each trailer unit''.....A separate freight order just for the trailer, on top of the actual FO (created for the OTR) ?

Sorry for all these questions, I nned to try to figure out the best option for our client betwen SAP TM and eWM.

Thanks a million !


Delphine

[Former Member]

Hi Delphine,

For trailers with no homebase location, sap remembers the last location where the trailers is planned to. The optimizer knows, where the trailer physically is/must be. The "status change" trailer unavailable is archieved when: The trailer is assisned to a trailer Unit document in that period of time, It has a downtime for that period in the trailer master data record or has a validity date that is before the planning date.

When you create the trailers in your own master data, i am afraid the trailers stay at the destination location and can't be re-used from your own yard.

Maybe, what you can do is create a multi resource trailer. For every trailer that enters the yard empty, create an empty trailer unit document (no locations or dates/times)and maintain the trailer info there.
For the users, create an transportation cockpit with the gantt chart, Trailer unit hierachy and the FU's. In the Trailer hierarchy they will see the "empty/unused" trailers as documents with no locations and the used trailers have loads on them. In the gantt chart they can drag and drop the FU's to the trailer documents and see it more visually. When the trailer is picked up by the carrier/leaves the yard, book an event Picked up or Departure and set this event as last expected event (TU type in SPRO), the trailer document will close and will be no longer available.

Or, Drag&Drop the full/ready TU document on an manually created FO and tender the FO, or book the events there.

Best Regards

Sander Knoll

[former_member194808]

Okay, so your transportation requirement is an OTR or DTR..

Maybe the trailer units/documents can help, see links below. You can create these documents, based on a trailer resource in advance and plan your freight units on it.

https://blogs.sap.com/2013/01/03/new-functionality-in-sap-tm-90/

https://help.sap.com/saphelp_tm92/helpdata/en/de/f665522838627fe10000000a44538d/frameset.htm

Maybe you might have a next challenge, since from the documentation I understand that no subcontracting is possible, so you also need to create Freight orders for each trailer document.

[Former Member]

I thought about using vehicles defined a Own vehicles, having them Available or Unavailable for planning (a same trailer might be dropped by the carrier over the time), but I miss a piece of the puzzle: how does its status change to Unavailable (if not manually), what is the planned process in SAP TM ?

Thank you very much for help Benno !

[Former Member]

I also wonder if the Empty provisioning would work with freight Orders as the SAP TM documentation is for forwarding orders...

[former_member194808]

empty-provisioning-trailer-units.pngDear Delphine,

Sounds a lot like empty provisioning, as far as I know this functionality within standard SAP is only available for containers(search for some standard SAP documentation).

I once asked SAP if this functionality is also available for trailers, this will create an extra FU stage, which you can plan and book events on, find attached the answer from SAP. Finally we didn't implement the proposed solution so no guarantee that it will work, but maybe for your organization it is useful.

[Former Member]

I can probably achieve most of my requirements with the list of available vehicle resources (defined as Own resources) in SAP TM, with the carrier (as the Owner and the Registration Number), the vehicle being manually assigned to a FO.

The one part I don't understand is how SAP TM (the Optimizer for instance) knows a specific vehicle resource has been shipped and is not available to be selected again, or is back and available gain ?

Thanks

Delphine

[Former Member]

No, thank you !

But I read it through and I wonder if it will really serve my purpose..

As I understand a newly created resource is not sent to Event Manager until it is assigned to a freight document in TM. So far so good, at least we see in TM the list of vehicle resources available.

In order to update the resource in TM (and I'm not sure what it would do, delete it ??) it requires an event coming into EM being then propagated, but my client does not receive any update from the carriers. The 'logical' event triggering the resource update would be the GI (or truck departure), but then that would mean a 2 step update from ERP (or eWM if used for execution) to EM, and then from EM to TM, right ?

Ultimately, what we need is to have in SAP TM an accurate list of resources physically available in the 'depot location'.

Any thought ? ?

Thanks !

[former_member194808]

You already found this document?

https://www.sap.com/documents/2015/07/2c3ab017-5a7c-0010-82c7-eda71af511fa.html