The transport & logistics operations require a transparent workflow in order to ensure the smooth transit of goods & services across the globe. But there are certain business challenges supply chain businesses have to handle.
The key challenges
1. Operational Challenges
- A lack of transparency in the whole transportation process.
- A lack of reporting and analysis based on real-time tracking.
- A need for an enhanced and digitized supply chain.
2. Strategic Challenges
- Difficulties in adapting to the changes in modern trends
- Costly and unprofitable supply chain
What are the requirements for visibility?
Each industry has its own unique requirements when it comes to visibility.
Visibility in Events Management
- Planned and unplanned activities
- Productivity and performance progress
- Accuracy of the overall work process
Cost & Revenue
Visibility in the cost and revenue brings out the clarity in understanding and analyzing the cost per product, ocean transport, and extra payment for carrier drivers.
Logistical Management
- Understand the vehicle capacity and usage.
- Vehicle and labor performance indicator.
- Temperature analysis
- Telematics
What is the industry-specific requirements for visibility?
E-commerce
- Transparency in the shipping, and last-mile delivery.
- Track ability of the shipping products
- Cost analysis of shipping
- Inter-company product-service analysis for B2B
Logistics Service Provider
- Visibility of the carrier driver
- Analytics on the origin and destination pair
- Visibility on the container capacity
- Visibility of the third-party warehouse
Manufacturing
- Tracing batch-wise products
- Integrating with the third-party service vendor
- Time analysis taken for the turnaround
- Visibility on the carrier
Enhance Visibility with SAP TM
The need to digitize the overall supply chain business cycle is to overcome certain challenges such as reduced capacity in the manufacturing chain, need for volatility for goods & services, balancing labor, and fulfilling shortages.
The SAP Transport Management System (SAP TM) allows organizations to have a clear perspective of the movement of their goods across the globe. It improves the business process, carries out inventory management, optimizes transport, visibility, reduces labor and transportation costs, and manages freight.
The main objective of SAP TM focuses on higher visibility of the supply chain through informed decision-making and agile workflow.
As we all know, the supply chain is a complex division that works along with multiple partners including vendors and clients. It needs a lot of intelligent technologies and transparency to streamline the fragmented segments, trades regulations, and layered visibility.
That’s where the utilization of SAP TM becomes the ultimate solution. It can work as a standalone or embedded solution in accord with the unique industrial requirements.
Functionalities of the SAP TM solution
The SAP Transport Management solution sets out an end-to-end multimodal visibility infrastructure that allows companies to track and trace their product at every point of transport starting from the warehouse to the port of loading to the port of discharging to the final delivery destination. As the transit takes up a lot of road and ocean/airtime, it becomes imperative to solutions such as SAP TM to enhance the perceptibility of product logistics.
Freight management in SAP TM
Freight Order
It allows the companies to have a clear perspective of the completed loads, departed carriers, roadway travel and arrival at the port of loading, and unloading of the goods at the port.
Freight Booking
Freight Agreement in SAP TM allocates container loading, unloading, vessel capacity, departure, and arrival at the port of discharge, and the container unloading at the port of unloading.
Freight Order
It allows logistics operations to have a clear view of the completed loads for delivery, a departure from port, on-road details, arrival, and unloading at the customer’s delivery place.
The access to the carrier network is done via API-based connections and the onboarding easiness comes in through an email-based registration that paves its way for digital communication with the carrier and the delivery place.
Now, all the reports obtained from the Freight settlements can be put together for analytics to observe the performance. The scalable and integrated approach of SAP TM also carries out customer service, product data management, security, and brings in skilled laborers. For retail businesses, SAP TM helps enable the omnichannel system and helps to cope with the global competition.
If you are looking to have more understanding of SAP solutions including SAP TM, SAP EWM, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP BRIM, SAP Subscription Billing, and SAP Plant Maintenance, kindly reach out to our experts at Mobolutions.