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Rule based automatic carrier determination in S/4HANA TM – clean-core approach

HariPanakkal
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
‎2025 May 14 8:51 PM
2,208

Determining the appropriate carrier for a freight order is nothing new to SAP TM. We have existing below approaches for determining/assignment of carrier.

  1. Via predecessor document like Sales Orders, Purchase orders, deliveries in S/4HANA and propagate to TM
  2. Via partner determination profile within TM
  3. Via carrier selection optimizer
  4. And of course, manual assignment or enhancements via custom process controller strategies

Each of these approaches have its own advantages. But if your carrier determination rules are simple (usually a list of carriers for O/D location/zone pair), selection do not need optimizer based on various conditions or not determined in Order management system (or wanted to move away the carrier determination process from ordering to transportation business), a new approach can be used thus avoiding non-clean core enhancements. Let’s review this approach(available from S/4HANA 2023 FPS03).

The core of this new solution is with the use of a new configuration called ‘Carrier Determination Profile’ (Fiori app-based configuration, not in SPRO). With this profile, you can define rules for determining a carrier. Those rules can be

  • Source and Destination location attributes
    • Location name, type, country, region
    • Zone including zone hierarchy
  • Weight and volume
    • Operator based (=, >=, <=, >, <)
  • Mode of transport
  • Material Freight group and transportation group
  • Service levels (sales shipping conditions)

It is like you are defining a BRF+ decision table. You can download it as template excel file and upload it after filling to ease data entry.

The app also allows simulating the rules by providing a document number (FU or FO or CO) or some attributes without even a document (See below screenshot)

HariPanakkal_0-1747251000696.png

 

Activating this feature

Activating this feature by assigning the carrier determination profile to FU or FO or Consignment order types. System will evaluate the rule during creation and relevant change of document. Evaluation is by first-match approach based on processing sequence.

On FO type

HariPanakkal_1-1747251000697.png

 

Available Enhancements

                  Enhancement spot /SCMTMS/ES_TSPD. With the BAdI, you can activate/de-activate this feature for certain documents of same document type. BAdI also allows to adjust whether re-calculation is needed or not based on your required changes. You can also adjust determined carrier if needed.

HariPanakkal_2-1747251000701.png

 

User Interface changes related to this feature

  • New carrier field in list/hierarchies for freight unit stages, freight orders and consignment orders
  • New mass change button in list/hierarchies for freight unit stages

Carrier Propagation from FU to FO

  • Carrier determined in FU will be propagated to FO
  • If there are multiple FU with different carrier, then carrier from first FU will be assigned to FO
  • If carrier is manually assigned in FO, then propagation will not take place from FU
  • If one FU is removed from FO, then carrier from next FU will be set on FO

Usage in requirement grouping profile

  • New grouping rule TSP_DOC available to group requirement documents such as FU by the carrier on document level.

With this feature, you can avoid enhancements to handle rule-based carrier determination requirements on SAP TM. If you have existing custom rule based carrier determination in old ECC process or LE-TRA process or even in TM, it’s time to explore this feature and come close to clean-core SAP standard.

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