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Michael_Haase
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
5,475


Dear friends of SAP TM,


An essential part of the logistics integration with TM embedded in SAP S/4HANA is the creation of transport requirements out of documents from SD, MM and LE, along with the creation of freight units based on those transport requirements. Thereby, one of the important tasks of TM is to identify transport relevant items from the predecessor document which is prerequisite to define a respective transport requirement.


Or in very simple words…if an item is not transport relevant, you won't get any freight units created for it as you never expect any transport planning or execution for it.


In this blog post, we will talk about how transport relevance is actually defined in logistics integration.



Basic principle


The transport relevance of an item or schedule line from a preceding document is influenced strongly by the goods movement relevance how TM defines it. And both of them are of course derived from the data of the predecessor document. Means also, that there's no setting in customizing or anywhere in TM where you can define transport or goods movement relevance and we depend solely on data from the preceding application.


Having this in mind we take a closer look on the respective preceding document in the following. Thereby, we focus on the most important use cases and data being relevant in this context. As you can imagine, there are a ton of different constellations and settings that play a role so this is more like a description how the basic principle is applied.



Purchase documents


The easiest part are the purchasing documents. Here, the goods movement status and the transport relevance are derived directly from the goods receipt indicator on item level (field EKPO-WEPOS). Means, only schedule lines of items where a goods receipt is expected can be relevant for a transport.


An exception are service and text items of a purchase document which are never transport relevant, which is pretty obvious.



Sales documents


In a sales document, we at first check the delivery relevance of a schedule line. Here, the delivery relevance of a schedule line is defined by the sales document itself (field VBEP-LFREL). Means, only schedule lines being delivery relevant in the sense of SD are considered for logistics integration.


The next step within logistics integration is then to define the goods movement relevance which is given if the following conditions are fulfilled:




  • A movement type is assigned to the schedule line

  • The material type of the material in the schedule line is foreseen for quantity updating (field T134W-MENGU)


And if the respective item is not rejected or cancelled, the schedule line is then also transport relevant, if it's goods movement relevant in the sense of TM.



Delivery document


The logic here is very similar to the integration of sales documents. Goods movement relevance is defined in the same way, but furthermore an item is never goods movement relevant if the indicator 'not relevant for goods movement' (field LIPS-NOWAB) is set on item level.


And finally, an item is transport relevant 'mainly' when the item is goods movement relevant and not rejected or cancelled (leaving out some cases for simplicity reasons).


So, next time when you're missing some freight units in TM after integrating documents from SD, MM or LE, you can now search for a possible cause when transport relevance is not given.


Appreciate your comments and feedback!


Best regards,


Michael