Incoterm location in freight unit stage building of SAP TM

[Michael_Haase]

Dear friends of SAP TM,

In this blog post,  we already talked about the assignment of incoterm locations in SD, MM and LE to 'real' locations in SAP TM.  In the example, we have seen that an additional stop had been created for the incoterm location:

Now, we will take a closer look at the necessary settings in customizing to enable (or disable) this adding of a stop in freight unit stage building.

The main setting influencing this behavior is the so-called Incoterm Location Stage Building Rule in the Logistics Integration Profile:

Basically, this setting decides during TM integration whether stages in freight units are built from and to the incoterm location and whether they are planning relevant or not.

In total, we have six different values for this setting. As they might be a bit hard to understand, let's make an example. We assume, we have incoterm EXW (Ex Works) and we create a sales order to deliver some goods from a plant to a customer, whereas the goods are to be picked up at a distribution center.

Here, you can see the six different values of the Incoterm Location Stage Building Rule and how the stages are built when integrating the sales order with TM:

So you see, depending on the Incoterm Location Stage Building Rule, the stage building differs and thus does the transportation planning. In other words...you choose the Logistics Integration Profile per sales document type/distribution channel and decide thereby with the selected Incoterm Location Stage Building Rule if you want to plan the whole transport or only the part from or to the incoterm location. Similarly of course when integrating documents from MM and LE.

Means…when you miss a stage in your created freight units, first check those settings before blaming the system or some innocent ABAP developers 🙂

I hope this gives a bit insight in stage building regarding incoterm locations.

Any feedback is appreciated!

Best regards,

Michael