Integration of external freight cost information for shipments

GPC launched in cooperation with a global provider of water, hygiene and energy technologies and services a standard solution to integrate freight costs of external solutions into an SAP® ERP system and to assign these costs – including detail information – to corresponding shipment documents to allow standard processing within GPC-FMS.
The project specifications to process freight costs provided by a TMS system including all details (Service codes, tax rates/amounts) for the appropriate shipment to create accruals and to enable an automatic freight cost settlement eliminated the existing functions for external freight cost information in GPC standard:

  • Entry of shipment flat charges
  • Use of freight cost information of the GPC enhancements of shipment headers or shipment legs
  • Take-over of pricing conditions of SD documents
  • Determination of freight rates in external systems

During blueprint of these customer-specific requirements the project partners agreed on the realization of a standard solution containing basic functionalities of the pilot installation due to the defined 6 month implementation period – completed during the rollout to further locations and transportation processes.

To standardize planned freight costs (accruals for shipments) and freight invoice settlement both processes are based on INVOIC02 IDoc messages.

The pilot installation covers shipment related freight costs only, shipment leg costs or delivery based costs are not considered in this phase. The freight cost are mapped per service code into GPC condition types and saved as freight result in GPC-FMS including freight value and tax information; Having freight costs in GPC standard logic allowing the immediate posting of accruals and transfer to CO and BI (via GPC statistics).

During freight invoice processing the system balances differences to existing accruals per cost element (service code) automatically; supplementary charges and discounts are added with specific condition types to each shipment separately. Releasing the freight invoice transfer the actual freight cost to FI and reverses the accruals (based on planned freight cost). Information in CO and BI/statistics are refreshed, too. The detailed mapping of planned and actual freight cost (accruals freight invoice) per shipment during freight invoice processing provides analysis options in BI apropos service quality and occurred additional charges.

After the successful Go-Live for direct truck shipments in Canada, the next implementation will cover container shipments (including truck shipments/drayage) and will also contain the rollout to US including LTL/FTL shipments.