SAP ACM And SAP TSW Integration with SAP TM on SAP S/4HANA for a Manufacturing Provider

Our team was responsible for all integration milestones and the development extensions based on the standard SAP TM objects.

Customer

A provider of food, agriculture, financial, and industrial products, as well as a manufacturer of agricultural products.

Challenge

Our customer lacked the ability to track all transportation costs.

Solution

Integration of SAP ACM and SAP TSW with SAP TM was the solution used to ensure the transparency of transportation costs and create value related to the physical movement of bulk agriculture commodities.

Products and Services

• SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM)
• SAP S/4HANA

Project Score

The major integration process we put into practice covered the following integration points:

I. Integration of SAP TSW nominations to the SAP TM system & integration of data from Load Data Capture (LDC) to documents in SAP TM

Based on nominations (agricultural business-specific documents for product shipments) created in SAP TSW, Freight Unit documents appear in SAP TM.

The next step is the creation of TM Freight Orders, which are synchronized with TSW nominations.

In the meantime, the Load Data Capture (LDC) document is generated in SAP ACM to let its users accumulate weight, grade, or other logistical data for bulk inbound and outbound shipments.

LDC updates the corresponding Freight Orders data and is aligned with a particular nomination.

II. Distribution of freight costs to the corresponding trading contracts

The next part of the integration between SAP TM, SAP ACM, and SAP TSW included the extensions of standard cost distribution, cost calculation options in Freight Orders and Freight Settlement Documents (SAP TM), and trading contract splitting (TSW and ACM).

Key Features

While dealing with LDC in SAP ACM was quite clear and transparent, our experts faced a number of tricky parts on both the TSW and TM sides:

• We needed to handle and check a wide range of transportation scenarios in the nomination documents — each scenario dictated specific integration terms.
• Our team supported parallel processing to prevent the excessive TM system load in case of thousands of incoming nomination documents.
• Cost distribution required much effort, too — we altered standard classes and methods, implemented trading contract splitting to reasonably calculate their percentage ratio, and allocated transportation costs.
• We provided an overview of cost distribution documents’ statuses — this status check triggered cost redistribution, if needed.

Results

After the integration between the three SAP modules, the agricultural company achieved a much higher degree of process automation for transportation planning processes, thus cutting costs for transportation.

All transportation-related procedures, including scheduling, collaboration, execution, or payments, became more transparent.

Timely settlement of freight costs based on nominations and their assignment to proper trading contracts improved customer profitability.