What is best practice for integration with freight forwarders?

[Former Member]

Hello,

We are looking into the possibilities for automatically exchanging data with one of our freight forwarders. We will send them our shipment information and they will send back shipment status and date information including some additional information like the house bill. Sending the shipment data from our SAP (ECC 6) system is no issue, we have done that before. What is new to us is receiving back the status updates from the forwarder. Is there a kind of best practice of where to store this information on the shipment (or in a separate tabel) and what standard function module or BADI to use for this?

We are using ECC 6.0 sales and distribution, but no transportation management or SCM modules.

Would, like to hear the experiences of people who have done this type of intergration with their forwarders.

Regards,

Ed

[moazzam_ali]

Hi

Without using transportation management you can't maintain shipment and shipment statuses. As suggested by Lakshmipathi Sir you can suggest you client to have TM solution. There is Transportation management in ECC as well which you can find in Logistics Execution. Configure shipment and shipment statuses there and maintain as per your requirement.

Thank$

[Former Member]

Hi MoazzaM,

We do use shipments in ECC. In config under LES, Transportation I see maintenance of event groups. Is that what you are referring to?

Ed

[Lakshmipathi]

SAP have added SAP TM 8.10 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 which will take care of your expectations.  For more information on this, search in Google so that you will get couple of documentations on this topic.

G. Lakshmipathi

[Former Member]

Thanks for your answer, but we do not have any plans for installing SAP TM. How would integration work with SAP ERP only?

Ed