LGM Knowledge Snippet: How do we determine carriers (as of now...)

[BerndDittrich]

One of the very basic ideas in SAP Logistics Management is to have super stable, well defined processes. This principle of course also applies to the way we determine carriers, so I want to explain a bit on that with some left and write comments on related topics. This posting describes our current state and we plan to improve in quite some of the described areas, but this is what we have today.

Relevance of carriers for the processes

For most of the shipping processes we support in LGM so far, the carrier is a prerequisite to start the process, including the warehousing. The idea here is, that for picking, labelling, staging it is necessary to already know the carrier when starting the warehouse processing.(yes, we know there are other scenarios and we plan to add them step by step, being cloud native allows us to do this step by step). Hence, the carrier determination is key to start the process.

Getting Carrier Integrated

Carriers (as well as other business partners ) are integrated using so called Replication Configuration. Basically, we pull the parties from the connected S/4 with either a scheduled job, or ad-hoc. A business partner needs the role "Carrier"(CRM010)  assigned to be considered as a carrier (again, this might be generalized in future). For some Shipping Processes like Parcel or Direct LTL, there also needs to be an external identification of the carrier maintained, e.g. the BN4L ID.

Carrier Determination process

So far, the carrier determination is following the following steps. The steps are so far always executed as described below, we plan to add some flexibility here in future. Once a carrier is determined in one of the steps, the processing is continued and the carrier cannot be changed anymore.

Check for carrier coming from S/4

If the S/4 delivery has a carrier assigned already it is taken over and carrier determination is over. At the moment, the partner function to be used is good old U3, this might be extended in future to other partner functions.

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Rules Based Carrier Determination

If there is no carrier defined in the delivery, we use Carrier Determination using the carrier determination business rule, the rule id is CARRIER_DETN_V1.  The currently available input parameters can be found in the linked documentation, we strongly recommend using the Shipping point rather than the source location. In the rule, the ID(the short identifier without any spaces in it, not the description)  of the carrier must be maintained. (yes, currently, we don have search helps and validations in place, we plan to improve here, of course 🙂 )

In the example the carrier LGMCARR1 is determined based on the ship to party ID:

For reference, this is where you find the ID in the business partner UI:

No worries, if the carrier determination is not maintained for all cases, there is some fallback available, which will follow in the next steps.

Tendering based Carrier Determination

If the previous step did not determine a carrier, we have something special in place for the Shipping Process we call Direct LTL. In this shipping process, the Tendering Process is started. As this opens up a world of it´s own, I leave this for another posting...

Fallback: Enter Carrier manual

In case all the previous steps were failing, you can enter the carrier manually. This can be done either in the Transportation Request or the consignment(this depends on the Shipping Process you are using, more on that in another posting...).

The documents with missing carrier can be identified easily by a red icon in the progress overview (this is our overarching pattern here, if there is an error requiring your attention, this is indicated in the progress overview):

 

Here, you can just enter the carrier manually.

Finally, of course you can also ask Joule about the process 🙂