Describe use cases for Transportation Management Systems
In transportation management, you can use your company’s transportation, or identify vendor and routing solutions for inbound and outbound orders. You can also identify the fastest route or the least expensive rate for a shipment using this module.
Planning transportation
Transportation planning is done based on the orders. You can also do the transportation planning based on shipments. Shipments are created from the orders only. You need to create loads consolidating multiple shipments. Loads initiate the transportation process. Transfer orders, which facilitate movement of goods across warehouses, can also be scheduled along with orders as transportable transactions. The following diagram illustrates planning transportation.
Inbound transportation
The Transportation module allows you to arrange transportation for the goods that you receive in your warehouse against the purchase orders. Using this module, you can coordinate the delivery and pickup of the incoming cargo from the respective vendors. The following diagram describes inbound transportation.
Outbound transportation
Outbound loads are created based on the sales order items that you need to ship from your warehouse to the customer. The Transportation management module can be used to organize the shipment and transportation of the outgoing load. The following diagram describes outbound transportation.
Load building
The Transportation module provides a Load building workbench page that helps to create loads from the sales order, purchase order, and transfer order based on the selected Load building strategy on the Setup FastTab.
Transportation management engines
Transportation management engines are responsible for configuring the carrier’s transportation rates based on the logic defined in the system. The engine system lets you change calculation strategies at runtime, based on parameters configured in the supply chain management.
The following are the engines available in the standard application.
Mileage engine: Calculates the transportation distance
Rate engine: Calculates rates
Transit time engine: Calculates the time that is required to travel from the start to the end destination
Zone engine: Calculates the zone, based on the current address, and calculates the number of zones that must be crossed to travel from source to destination
Generic engine: Engines that are used by other engines that don't require data from the system
You can create a custom engine model to connect to external systems in case the configuration of the standard engine isn't feasible for a given scenario.
Bill of lading
The Transportation management module can create the bill of lading, which is a legal document between the company that ships the items and the carrier. The bill of lading escorts the shipped items along with the source and the destination addresses, carrier, billing information, and other details about the shipment.
There are several ways to generate the bill of lading. You can navigate to the Sales and marketing > Sales orders > Order shipping > Bill of lading page to create a new bill of lading for a shipment. Alternatively, you can navigate to the Transportation management > Planning > Load planning workbench page. You find the Shipped loads in the Loads grid. Under the Generate menu, you find the option to generate the Bill of lading.