Freight Planning

Rough planning provides estimates of both available transport capacity and required transport capacity in a given period of time. Those responsible for freight planning can use these estimates to see how much transport capacity is available to them, how much they need, and, if necessary, arrange additional capacity from their carriers.

The transport capacity requirement overviews are based on aggregated volume, weight, and floor space figures of selected freight orders for a time span defined by the user. The volume, weight, and floor space figures can be presented in selected measuring units. You can print daily, weekly, and monthly requirement reports over a selected period. You can also display the overviews in a chart.

Load Building is the core functionality of Freight. The primary purpose of load building is to plan the transportation of goods from your warehouse to the customer, from your supplier to your warehouse, or from a supplier directly to your customer, in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. Alternatively, you can employ this functionality for goods movements between your warehouses, or from warehouse to production environment and vice versa.

The load building engine creates a load plan from a range of freight orders and freight order lines selected by the user. A load plan consists of a number of loads. Each load consists of a number of shipments.

The load building engine offers various planning options and three basic planning methods. You can create various load plans from the same freight orders, each time using a different planning method and/or different planning options, to see which method or options provide the best result.

The Load Building module provides a Gantt chart that gives a timeline overview of loads and shipments as well as a capacity overview of resources: transport means groups, transport means combinations, and means of transport.

In Load Building, you can maintain the load plans, loads and the shipments created by the load building engine. Maintenance activities can include status changes or changes to other settings in the load plans, loads, or shipments.

In Freight you can plan transport for individual means of transport. This functionality supports transport planning for organizations that run their own fleet, but it can also plan for means of transport that are not self-owned. When load building is carried out for a range of freight orders, available means of transport are scheduled for the load created from the selected freight orders. If no means of transport have been defined, loads are created without allocating specific means of transport. After the load building procedure is carried out, you can manually modify the means of transport to loads.

To use Freight to plan or cluster direct deliveries, freight orders are generated from purchase orders that are linked to direct delivery sales orders or service orders. Since the goods are directly transported from the buy-from business partner to the sold-to business partner in direct deliveries, the warehouses defined in LN are not involved. Therefore, the freight orders, clusters, loads, and shipments are not updated from Warehousing, but only from the direct delivery sales order and related purchase order in Order Management.

In multisite environments, freight orders can be generated from originating orders created in various logistic companies. The freight orders are planned or clustered and executed in one or more designated freight planning companies. When the freight order generation process is performed, the freight orders are allocated to a freight planning company.

Actual loads and shipments are sent to the originating companies where Warehousing can execute them. The actual shipping information is then sent back to the freight planning company. In the freight planning company, the loads can be completed and closed. Most freight master data is shared across the logistic companies within the multisite setup.

All freight planning and executing information is only available in the freight planning company, this is the company of the freight order. The freight planning company can be any logistic company in the multisite structure.

If any information is requested for a freight order line from an originating company, LN automatically displays or returns the required information from the freight planning company of the freight order line. Similarly, if a process in freight management requires information from or sends information to the originating company, LN automatically goes to the originating company.