Creating the Supply Network with Transportation Lanes

Transportation Lanes connect up the nodes in the network. When Purchasing Info Records, Scheduling Agreements are CIFed over to SCM Transportation Lanes are automatically created. However, if you need to created them, you can go into (/SAPAPO/SCC_TL1) and set them up there. However, when we go to do this, we find that the transportation lane has already been created, most likely from our purchasing info record that we CIFed over earlier. Here is how they are created one by one, however, this is not the best way to do it, but it is merely for instructional purposes. Really, these should come across from he CIF, unless the SCM instance is stand alone from SAP ERP. There are five different ways to created Transportation Lanes.

1. Using the transportation lane maintenance screen
2. Using SCE
3. Transportation lane mass maintenance
4. Transferring Purchasing Info Records (our preferred way for the sake of simplicity, of course this will not do when we need transportation lanes between internal plants/locations for transfer orders.)
5. Transferring the special procurement key

Mass Maintenance Creation

The Mass Maintenance transaction is the (SAPAPO/SCC_TL1) is the fastest way we know of to create transportation lanes. It may be one of best transactions in terms of ease of use for payoff we have used. This good because creating Transportation Lanes using the one by one method may be one of SAP’s worst transactions in terms of usability. You simply need to have a transportation lane already created in order to begin. We used a transportation lane that was already created for us by CIFing over the Purchasing Info Record.

Just like that it created 20 transportation lanes for us between all of our plants.

Transportation Resource

You can create Transportation Resources by going to the transaction (/SAPAPO/RES01).

However, while it allowed us to create Transportation Resources, it seemed to have a hard time remembering it had created them.

We created 5 different Transportation Resource, but could find none of them when we went to go and edit them. However, when we tried to recreate them, we could not because SAP said that they were created already. However, we thought we would test if we could assign these Transportation Resources to Transportation Lanes (TL) that we created earlier in this post. Understand that the only functioning item in these TLs is the calendar that we have assigned. That is it is the only item which would limit the application of demand on the resource.

First we go back to the Transportation Lane transaction (/SAPAPO/SCC_TL1) and select the appropriate lane, then select the “create” button under “Means of Transport.”

(Hit the page button above) This will bring up the entry panel to the right.

There are some interesting things which can be configured. A few that caught our eye is the following:

• Transportation Calendar
• Transportation Distance
• Transportation Duration
• Transportation Cost
• Resource (assigned to lane)

We found these interesting because they can be used to model important factors in the system. We have a post linking to this and it deals with inventory balancing. The Transportation Cost would be an element which would help determine if a stock movement would take place. It would look at the transportation cost, warehouse space savings, service level improvement (this is a function of SPP).

Transportation lanes can be setup in the following way.

• Product Specific
• Means of Transport
• Product Specific Means of Transport

The way we just demonstrated was the means of transport. However, products or product groups can have their own special transportation lanes setup for them. Here is how the setup changes when a specific product, or groups of products are involved.

We were successful in assigning the Transportation Resource (TR) that we created, therefore, we are pretty sure it exists and the previous message we received when we tried to edit the TR was an SAP error.

The different resource types are described in the post below.

http://www.scmfocus.com/sapplanning/2009/05/02/scm-resource-types/