Consignment Order in SAP S/4HANA TM based upon Advanced Shipping Notifications

In this blog post I try to show how the newly introduced document, “Consignment Order” fits into the overall procurement process.

Note: This blog post shares my personal insights based on my experience working with customers in Manufacturing and Retail industry and my insight into SAP solutions only. I have demonstrated the functionality in this blog post using system screen images with relevant data for ease of understanding for the readers. It should be noted that these screens and the data is from SAP’s internal test systems and has no relation to any external source

Process Flow

In the picture below, you can see how the new document “Consignment Order” is used in relation to the ASNs

Consignment Process Flow with Incoterms DDP

Documents in S/4HANA

1. Purchase Order / Contract / Scheduling Agreements etc can be used as the source of the Freight Units

Below you see a PO with two schedule lines

Purchase Order with Schedule Lines

When the Purchasing Documents are integrated to SAP Transportation Management, it results into Freight Units (how many you generate is controlled via the FUBR setup)

Freight Units for PO

2. ASN receipt into SAP TM as a Consignment Order is enabled via the TOR Generic service interface TransportationOrderGenericRequest_In. 

Consignment Order (Order Type customization needs to be in place) is created once the message is processed successfully. Below I created 2 ASNs for the same PO that resulted into 2 Consignment Orders (8 EA and 2 EA respectively)

Consignment Order 1

Consignment order 1 Item Hierarchy

You can see that out of 10 initial FUs only 3 are remaining (FU ending with *84787 now has 8EA) and remaining FUs are not changed.

FU consumption based on Consignment Order 1

Consignment Order 2

Consignment Order 2_Item Hierarchy

Below you see that once the Consignment Order for 2 EA is received the remain FUs are consumed. So what is left out of initial 10 FUs are only 2 FUs with 8EA and 2 EA quantities which are incoming via the 2 ASNs.

FU consumption based on Consignment Order 2

3. The LSP can also communicate the Truck Transport information (which ASNs are part of the Truck) in the form of Despatch Note which results into a Freight Order. This information is also received into SAP TM is enabled via the TOR Generic service interface TransportationOrderGenericRequest_In. 

Below you see how the FRO links the Consignments.

Freight Order with Consignements or ASNs

To inform the warehouse about the incoming Truck, the Delivery Proposals can be initiated from the Freight Order, which would create the Inbound Deliveries and distribute them to the Warehouse.

Initiate Delivery

Freight Order with Linked Inbound Delivery