Ways to Fix a Freight Order

Dear all,

We have a scenario where we create FWO's and the associated FU's are planned on FO's which are executed by our own trucks and drivers. We are sending daily all the FU's and FO's to the optimizer so the planning gets improved all the time(FO's are deleted and new ones created). However we communicate one week in advance with our drivers how their workschedule will look, so from that moment the system must not make any changes anymore in the FO's. Currently we achieve this by fixing the FO's one week before execution date, we do this manually! I have been searching for a standard SAP program to automate this process, but can't find any. So I am curious how other SAP TM customers have solved this, it seems to me it is also a requirement for shippers who don't want send updated FO's at the last moment to their carriers(I did some testing and as far as I have seen the fix status is also not automatically set e.g. when FO is confirmed by the carrier, is that correct?). By my knowledge the only way to set the fixing status automatically is to define in customizing "Fix Document when saving" in the FO type, but this is to early for us since we still want to update the plan(until 1 week before execution date).

What I am currently considering is to make 2 planning strategies, one which does not fix the FO automatically(standard behavior) and one which does fix the FO. Subsequently we will make 2 planning profiles with these 2 strategies which will both run by a batch job during the night. The first planning profile will contain all FO's(the fixed ones will be skipped anyway) and the second planning profile will only have the FO's(determined by selection profile) that have execution date < 7 days), and these will be fixed automatically.

I am curious what you think about this solution or are there better ways in SAP TM? Have other organizations faced similar challenges and how did you solve this?

Kind regards,

Benno Mateman