Customer specific shipping labels

[Former Member]

Hi All,

I am dealing with automotive client that ships to automotive customers and each customers have their own specific shipping labels for boxes (3S) and pallets (4S). Our challenge is we have close to 200 customer specific labels to be developed in SAP and this is putting the risk to development timelines. We are currently putting an effort to harmonize the labels and go back to customers that are less critical to move to standard shipping labels.

I want to understand if you have come across similar requirement and if yes, how it was handled.

Thanks.

Naren

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Yes Naren, this is normal for SAP Implementation for Automotive Suppliers.

There has been an effort by the Automotive OEMs and Tier 1's and their Industry Groups to standardize their labels over the years. For example, in North America, the AIAG has Guidelines for the B10 Shipping Label, however, most Automotive Customer still have their own specific requirements for that B10, that your client, as their Supplier, must comply with. This is often a condition of doing business with that customer.

As Manish says, when the label requirements are similar for a number of customers, it's worth having someone check with the Customers, and it sometimes has to be at the plant/planner level, not at headquarters, whether a slightly different label format than what was produced in legacy is acceptable. Then you can use one form for multiple customers.

During Blueprint or early stages of Realization, all the different labels should be inventoried and analyzed to determine exactly how many are required, and where the data will come from. Are the label fields coming from inbound EDI? If labels are generated from HU's, what is the packing process in SAP, and are container material masters, packing instructions and packing determination going to be required? If the customer requires the label serial number on the ASN, is there a scanning process to scan the labels to the outbound delivery or shipment?  How does this affect unit and integration testing?

Testing for Honda North America is particularly strict. The Automotive Supplier must pass a certification with Honda BEFORE they are given permission to switch from their legacy system to SAP.

There are up to six different labels required by Honda (Container, Quick Receive, Master, Mixed, Delivery Batch, and sometimes a Pack Label). Certification includes mailing Honda hardcopy labels generated by the SAP system. These must be completely compliant with Honda's Label Guidelines, must be easily scan-able by Honda, must be generated in conjunction with Honda provided 862 and 850 EDI, and must comply with Honda prescribed test cases (even if the Supplier doesn't have that scenario in real life) and must match to the certification ASNs and Honda Master Packing List forms you generate out of SAP.

So hopefully Honda isn't on your list. But labels are typically a large part of an SAP project when Automotive Customers are involved.

And overall, all these forms have an impact on the output configuration and master data. If you end up with 200 forms, you probably want to put the form name only in the output condition record, and not have 200 different output types with the form specified each. But even with that, plan on some extra time to test all the labels, include plans to enter / load the master data in development, QA and production, and to train whomever is responsible for that set up in SAP.

Good luck, and if anyone has another way, I'd love to hear.

[former_member1343765 · Accepted solution]

Hi Charlyn,

I liked your detailed explanation about the responsibility of using correct shipping labels for OEM.

We are an Automotive Supplier to OEM like GM,Ford etc. We have decided to move from

our legacy based ERP called JDE/Future3  to SAP.

Our OEM labels are designed/printed using TLAshford which is integrated with an old Warehouse Mgmt System for picking orders which is also interfaced with the EDI Shipping S/W called Future 3

for shippers.

Now we have to use figure out how SAP can handle the printing of such OEM specific labels

during shipping time when we get rid of the WMS and EDI shipping s/w Future3 ?

Does SAP ERP provide a way for printing OEM labels which follow AIAG stds ?

Can you recommend how we go about printing OEM labels and also managing EDI with SAP ?

Thanks

Trevor

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Trevor,

SAP can generate AIAG labels as these labels are required to be developed (SAP smartforms) in SAP landscape following guidelines (and your customer requirements). In my case, we ended up developing over 100 plus labels after label harmonization effort similar to what Manish/Charlyn mentioned.

In hindsight, few things that are critical during label development: 

1. Check if the label is a actual customer requirement or not. Many times we say similar labels being developed as customer requirement was not clarified. This depends on the timeline you are going to be dealing with (we were in a time crunch).

2. Test labels on all your printers regardless of what IT infrastructure leads inform in UAT. We had major issues during UAT phase, and I am glad we found before go-live as there were lot of firmware updates on printers that were required and we missed it during initial testing phases.

3. I recently read an article on SAP GLM (global label management) and it's integration with Genefix. GLM is within E&HS module so you can check if that's available in your SAP landscape. If yes, maybe check if developing labels in this landscape is a better option.

Thanks.

Naren

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Trevor, I supported F/3 a long time ago, so I totally understand your challenge to go to SAP.

Anyway, some global label formats are available from SAP.

You might be able to get to those objects from SAP Best Practices --> Industry Packages --> Automotive (Supplier) --> SAP Best Practices for Automotive V1.604 (localized for Japan)

http://help.sap.com/bp_auto604/Auto_JP/html/index_EN_JP.htm

Unfortunately in North America, additional development is required if you are printing the labels out of SAP.

We developed a library of Adobe forms for the customer specific labels for all the OEM's, and the Tier 1's that our clients needed.

And usually, a custom version of the label print program is needed to pull in additional data from some SAP tables, like the JIT tables, and wherever you store the pass thru data that comes in on the EDI and needs to be echoed back on labels and ASNs. (We use a custom table that gets populated during idoc_input_delins and idoc_input_orders.

Once you have one B-10 form developed, it's not too hard to do the rest of the labels.

Usually the labels are printed as output from handling units, and the output condition records are in VV62. 

[mihailo_sundic]

I'll be focused more on your project management part of the story.

QUOTE: Our challenge is we have close to 200 customer specific labels to be developed in SAP and this is putting the risk to development timelines.

QUESTION: If you are working by ASAP or any good methodology, you surely did a blueprint before actual implementation. In AS-IS analisys, you should have got the info about that, since it's critical for warehous in automotive.

Remark: So I think that the fair solution to the problem is to hire another developer to create all those required label types, since your PM should have predicted that, basically it's the implementators fault and he should cover it by extending the team (and costs).

Regards,
Mihailo

[MANIS]

Hi Naren,

Deciding whether to use the standard label or generating new shipping label is always a tough task in all of my project i started with standard shipping label and landed in developing new shipping label / smart form.

we had the similar requirement like you and we did an analysis and identified how many variation are there and after all this we found we were supposed to generate around 30 different shipping  label. When we looked at detail level among them then we identified that there are few shipping label which are having difference of only one or two field and we went back to business explained him and finally we landed to generate 5 shipping label.

I can also suggest the same map the individual requirement check what are the difference and try to convince business

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