The use of shipping offices and planning groups

The shipping office and planning group entities play a key role in freight order grouping and load building.

Business environment

In most organizations, shipping offices are responsible for the planning or subcontracting of transportation of goods listed on orders. As a rule, each shipping office is responsible for the transportation of orders that originate from a particular warehouse or group of warehouses. Usually, each warehouse stores particular types of goods, or goods that require special handling.

Setup

In LN, this situation is reflected by the ability to link the warehouse entities to shipping office entities. One or more warehouses can be linked to a shipping office. A shipping office can have various warehouses, but a warehouse can only be linked to one shipping office. In addition, each sales order, purchase order, or planned distribution order created in LN is linked to a warehouse. This is performed to indicate the warehouse where the goods listed on the order come from, or are to be delivered to, and to group the freight orders.

Note: For direct deliveries, however, the goods originate from external suppliers and go directly to customers without going through your warehouse. Therefore, there is no link between the shipping office and warehouses, or originating orders and warehouses in the direct delivery situation. This situation is modeled by means of shipping matrices that have no warehouses as selection criteria.

Outline of the freight order and freight order line grouping process

To perform load building or freight order clustering, freight orders are first grouped by shipping office. Freight order grouping is based on shipping office matrices that provide various criteria to select shipping offices. If no suitable matrix is available, the shipping office is selected based on the warehouses linked to shipping offices in the Warehouses by Shipping Office (fmfmd0185m000) session. For direct deliveries, shipping office matrices are used that have no warehouses as selection criteria.

Then, when a number of freight orders are allocated to a shipping office, the freight order lines of these freight orders are grouped into the planning groups defined for this shipping office. The groups of linked freight order lines and planning groups are used by the load building engine to build shipments and loads.