SAP Sales and Distribution to be used for Sales and Billing of Port services

[Former Member]

Hi Gurus,

I currently have a project in which our client involved in port operations would like to use SAP R/3. They wanted to use FI, CO, SD and MM.

Our client's products are all services (moving one container from ship to yard, etc.) therefore delivery/shipping processes will not be used. Kindly let me know if SAP SD will be able to manage such operations? Lastly, can you provide an overview on how the SD design might look like? It seems to me that the components which will be used in SD are as follows:

- Customer Master

- Material Master (is this possible if products are services?)

- Sales

- Billing

Any inputs on how I can go about this project will be much appreciated.

[neeraj_lal]

Hi Ivan Thomas,

It all depends upon how deep transportation is getting use in your customer business process.

If intricate shipmet planning is not part of business process then for shipper scenario SAP LE-TRA can be use with some SAP extenstion like FCX.

LE-TRA canot not catch intricate planning scenario,  combining outbound and inbound delivery or different types of delivery  in one shipment document, Mile calculator, geographical location tagging etc and many more.

In case if your customer is having freight forwarder scenario or intricate shipment planning is part of business process then you should recommend SAP - TM 8.0 and above version.

Note: SAP TMS 8.0 and above version require seperate system same like in CRM which will add extra cost in comparison to LE-TRA version.

Yes you can use material master for service product. 

Condtion master, limited HR master may also be require.

Check below link having details of latest SAP TMS 9.0 version launched in Feb 2013 end

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-31395 

Take help of your SAP team member to decide require sap component. THis forum can only suggest you but forum do not have any visibility on what exact your business requirement is. So use your own analysis and decision to discuss with customer

Regards

[Lakshmipathi]

You should be aware Transportation comes in as an added component in ECC which we call as Logistics Execution.  Apart from this, SAP have also added SAP TM as a separate package which is also integrated with R/3 which means, a separate server is required if SAP TM needs to be implemented.  I think, this will cater to the industry what you are looking for to some extent and you need to go for some interfaces as well as there is no SAP package for IS-Shipping.

For more information on SAP TM 8.00, please search in Google so that you will find couple of useful and helpful documentations.

G. Lakshmipathi