Freight Master Data

The shipping office and planning group entities play a vital role in freight order grouping and load building. A load is the largest consignment for which Freight plans transportation. A load includes a number of items travelling in a specific type of vehicle to a given destination on a given date and time via a specific route. Shipping offices are responsible for the planning or subcontracting of transportation of goods listed on orders. Planning groups are used to group freight order lines into shipments and loads or freight order clusters.

Address data includes loading and unloading lead times and load and unload date tolerances. Address lead times indicate the time required for loading and unloading at addresses, including loading and unloading tolerances. Tolerances indicate the time span by which you are allowed to deviate from planned load or unload dates.

When sales orders, purchase orders, planned distribution orders, or warehouse orders require transportation, freight orders are created from these orders. Freight orders are created automatically, per batch, or sometimes manually. During this process, the freight orders are provided with specific freight related information.

Transport means groups are used to group items on freight order lines into shipments and loads or freight order clusters, and to determine the costs of transportation. Each means of transport defined in Freight belongs to a transport means group. A transport means group is a classification that subdivides means of transport into groups, such as:

For each transport means group, you can define average speed and loading capacity.

Combination codes are used to prevent the load building and freight order clustering engines from creating loads or clusters for undesirable combinations of items.

A transport type is a code that refers to transport conditions and transport properties. You can use transport types to ensure that the items are transported by means of transport with appropriate conditions and to determine the cost of transportation.

You can use freight order types to classify the freight orders and group freight orders and freight order lines by planning group. This enables the load building engine to build load plans from the grouped freight orders.

A freight service level is used to express the duration of transportation. These are added to the freight orders, order lines, and shipments by using freight order types. You can use freight service levels to determine the transportation costs of a load or the freight rate for a freight order.

A volume class is allocated to a range of volumes, for example, from 1 gallon to 10 gallons. Volume classes can be used to determine the planning group of freight order lines. A weight class is allocated to a range of weights, for example, from 10 lbs to 50 lbs. A class code is a code used to identify volume classes and weight classes.

A shipping office matrix is used to link shipping offices to freight orders. This is an integral part of the load building process.

A plan matrix is a set of attributes and values used as selection criteria for a planning group. When a freight order is allocated to a shipping office, the order lines of the freight order are allocated to the planning groups of the shipping office. To determine the planning group for a freight order line, plan matrices are used.

An additional cost set consists of a code and a description. To each additional cost set, you must link one or more selection criteria and one or more cost items. In the cost items, the actual additional cost amounts are stored. The criteria for shipment lines and cluster lines to be charged with extra costs and the amounts are maintained in additional cost sets. If a shipment line or a cluster line matches the criteria of an additional cost set, extra charges are added to the shipment line or cluster line.

A route plan is a network of loading and unloading addresses, one of which is a pooling point. A route plan can consist of more than one leg. Each leg, or part of the route, can be handled differently, depending on the specified transport category and transport group. Route plans are linked to addresses.

A standard route is a fixed route that is traveled with a particular frequency, such as a truck that visits delivery addresses according to a fixed schedule, a rail service, or a boat service. Usually, transportation via standard routes costs less than travel via non-fixed routes.