Transportation Portal for Supply Chain Collaboration using SAP Business Technology Platform

[nilay_mehta123]

With the Carrier Collaboration Portal deprecated in S/4HANA embedded Transportation Management, we see an ardent need for a platform to collaborate between shippers and external parties. Built using SAP Business Technology Platform Portal Service along  with SAP Conversational AI and SAP Analytics Cloud, powered by SAP S/4HANA and integrated with Google Maps, Microsoft Teams and JIRA Service Desk this cloud-based Transportation Portal enables you to easily collaborate with all of the supply chain parties at a very detailed level.

Imagine a world without customers calling carriers asking their ETA, suppliers confirming quantities over an email, shippers procuring wrong raw materials, carriers charging high demurrages for long wait times. Yes, it is possible! Lets see how.. 

The Transportation Portal is a platform enabling all the business entities in your transportation network like carriers, vendors, suppliers, 3PLs, customers, et al. to exchange information related transactional orders without any form of external communication. This portal can perceived as the first step towards building a control tower, providing a holistic view of your supply chain and logistics execution processes. In order to fully digitize your supply chain and to leverage new age technologies, we built this robust solution which is true sense bring together all the parties on a single platform. Moreover, it provides an efficient way to incorporate changing business needs and adapt to latest industry trends. It is a game changer in the B2B and B2C relationships with an overall goal to enable vendor self-service, empower carriers to provide visibility and improve customer trust through transparency.

In order to solve the wide array of supply chain problems, we divided the Transportation Portal by the four major personas that require a strong collaboration to smoothly execute transportation on a day-to-day basis.

Carrier Collaboration: One of the major challenges of supply chain execution is finding the best carrier that can deliver the goods at the least freight costs and more importantly on-time. This portal closely integrated with SAP Transportation Management not only helps find a carrier accurately but also enables the carriers to provide visibility of the order in real-time.

Carrier Collaboration Capabilities

 

Supplier Collaboration: Manage and build a streamlined supplier network, enabling a deep visibility to the supplier actions on purchase orders. Suppliers can confirm quantities ready to be shipped and the correct pick-up dates. Shippers can now plan subsequent manufacturing activities and manage sequence of receiving goods. Suppliers can adhere to the packaging standards supporting vendor-direct sales scenarios.

Supplier Collaboration Capabilities

 

Customer Collaboration: Provide your customers a complete visibility into the orders in execution with real-time updates from carriers. Customers can manage the delivery time as well to streamline receipt of goods and subsequently record claims. Provide freight costs upfront to make service-level decisions using a simple freight rate calculator or use the SAP Conversational AI chatbot designed to calculate shipping costs.

Customer Collaboration Capabilities

 

Shipper Collaboration: To a internal users of your organization, the portal provides full control over the visibility apps and views for external parties. With SAP Analytics Cloud integrated, shippers can enjoy customized dashboard to get an analytical reports on transportation spend, carrier costs, vehicle utilization, resource allocation and much more.Using SAP Conversation AI, we built a transportation chatbot to cater to the needs of customer service representatives and transportation planners to easily access data and provide a 24/7 support.

Shipper Collaboration Capabilities

 

In these unprecedented times, managing supply chain and ensuring that the transportation businesses run seamlessly has been a topmost priority for various organizations. Having such an integrated solution carefully catered to solve logistics execution problems not only digitizes your supply chain but also helps you take a big leap towards becoming an Intelligent Enterprise.

For further information, feel free to contact me!

 

Thank you for reading!

Nilay Mehta

[kevin_wilson2]

How does this relate to SAP Logistics Business Network where Carriers and Freight Forwarders already have a portal and B2B connectivity to load this data?

[Paul_P]

Thanks for sharing nilay.mehta123!

[former_member666185]

This is great! Thanks for sharing. How can I find out more on the Shipper Collaboration Capabilities?

[nilay_mehta123]

You can contact us for further information.

[nilay_mehta123]

SAP LBN also has a portal but only for on-boarded carriers and freight forwarders. This Portal built on SAP BTP, allows shipper collaboration with end-customers, vendors and carriers with full control over any business specific requirements.

[former_member136382]

Thank you very much. The blog was very helpful. But I have some queries -

1. Will the portal be accessible if SAP client does not have Transportation Management implemented?


2. Will the transport Vendors / Vendors / Customers of the SAP client be able to access the portal even if they do not have SAP license?