Change is inevitable in our life and also very much relevant in supply change execution processes. Many a time, freight estimated (or calculated) for a transportation (or shipment) is different from the actual freight cost. SAP has provided automatic change process for handling of differences in freight cost in S/4HANA 2020 release. My present blog is to discuss on the ‘Change process’ with settlement of freight cost, its business benefits and pre-requisite configurations in Transportation management ( TM ) in S/4HANA 2020 release.
A typical Order to cash flow with Transportation management in S/4HANA is shown in below image. Freight charges are calculated in Freight order and subsequently Freight settlement document is created in TM which create Purchase order and Service entry sheet corresponding to the freight cost calculated in freight order.
A complete cycle from Sales order to Service entry sheet is depicted in below image. Note that the ‘Invoicing status’ is ‘
Completely invoiced’ in the freight order.
Now in real life, actual freight cost after the execution of the transportation is different and its causes may be additional weight / volume, custom charges, handling charges , delay etc. Now with S/4HANA 2020 release, an automatic change process is triggered in case of change in settled freight line cost as depicted in below image. In case of any change in freight line cost, system
- Automatically changes the invoicing status to ‘ Not up-to-date’ and
- 'reverses and reposts' i.e cancels the previous settlement document with a credit memo of the corresponding amount and creates a new settlement document with updated freight cost
Added a miscellaneous cost of 100 Euro in that freight order and note that the invoicing status automatically got changed to ‘
Not Up-to-Date’ as highlighted and shown in below image.
Now triggered the creation of freight settlement document, system created a credit memo 810000024 (to cancel previous settlement document 8100000240) and a new settlement document 8100000241 with updated freight cost as shown in below image along with the complete document flow on the freight order.
This new change process will enable
- simplification for changes in freight cost after freight settlement
- the Logistic service provider to work in more collaborative way (i.e there is no requirement to claim additional freight cost through Dispute etc)
One of the pre-requisite configurations is to flag ‘
Influence invoicing status’ and ‘
automatically enter credit amount’ for the corresponding credit memo as shown in below image.
Note that the scenario described in this blog corresponds to Shipper with embedded TM in S/4HANA , however this new change process has also been enabled for LSP (Logistic service provider ) scenario with forwarding order and also stand alone TM.
This blog is based on my personal tests and insghts . Please comment your views and inform your feedback.