Route and tour planning based on SAP SD
Major retail companies ship goods to their end customers from a central warehouse. In this procedure often – invisible to the end customer – a set of supply warehouses is involved. Though SAP can map the intermediate transport, planning and compilation of delivery tours however becomes so tedious in SAP standard that it is often not used.
Clavis has developed a system based on SAP SD as part of a customer project that supports route planning by a comfortable cockpit.
Initial Situation: Intermediate transports with paper handling
Before introducing the new route planning, our customer did not use the SAP standard and thus did not map the allocation to supply plant and shipping point via transfer orders in SAP. The allocation of a supplier plant and a shipping point could not be mapped into SAP by stock transport orders. Instead of using SAP the customer therefore managed its intermediary transport by paperwork. In the delivering plant delivery notes were presorted into storage bins and subsequently assigned to routes. Delivery note numbers are entered into an Excel sheet that was printed together with the delivery notes for the loading of the truck and the delivery to the customer. At completion of the tour the delivery notes were verified at the shipping point and posted as goods issues.
Automated route planning with the easy-to-use cockpit from clavis
The aim of the project was to automate the route planning and to integrate the complete process into SAP. Thus, a transparency of shipments should be established: which delivery is part of which transport and when do goods arrive at the end customer.
Here an intuitive cockpit guides through the planning process:
- Creation of shipments (tours)
- Assigning of individual delivery note s via barcode scan
- Grouping of delivery note s by consignee
- Automatic consideration of a predefined delivery sequence
- Matching the number of pallets and/or weight of shipments with the capacity of the truck
- Generating of shipping and cargo documents once the transport has been released by the tour planner.
- Correct loading of truck through annotation of the predefined delivery sequence on all shipping and cargo documents
- Clearly arranged status of each shipment by status light control.
- Reporting transaction with different critera (customer number, zip code, etc.) for whereabouts of shipments
Smooth Process, Less Wrong Deliveries
By this solution the work of the route planner is simplified considerably. The delivery processes becomes more transparent and thus at arrival of the transport it is immediately clear which goods belong where Overall a smooth process is generated that saves a lot of paper and time, avoids incorrect deliveries and increases customer satisfaction.
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