Transportation Management Overview

As a shipper, you use Infor SCE Transportation Management (TM) as a tool to keep freight costs as low as possible and bring efficiencies to your company by reducing time spent selecting carriers and tendering routes to them.

As a carrier, you use TM to accept or reject tendered routes and maintain route tracking number information, and provide status event information.

Transportation Management provides your company with the following benefits:

• Visibility to all the shipments being processed by TM:
  • Carrier assignment
  • Ship and delivery dates calculated during the rating and routing process
  • Equipment and services information
  • Freight charges
  • Status event information
• Ability to take a variety of actions against the shipment based on its status:
  • Select a carrier for the shipment
  • Tender the shipment
  • Create a route from a shipment or multiple shipments
  • Assign shipments as a candidate for the optimization process
  • Exclude shipments from the optimization process
  • Create shipments for goods not moving in or out of an Infor warehouse
• Visibility to all carrier routes created by TM as a result of automated processing or manual user interaction:
  • Carrier assignment
  • Route stop detail, including associated shipments
  • Freight charge detail
  • Status event information
• Ability to take a variety of actions against the carrier route based on its status:
  • Assign a carrier to the route
  • Select a carrier for the route
  • Tender a route
  • Re-tender a route
  • Cancel a tender
  • Cancel a route
  • Maintain tracking numbers
  • Post event

• Real-time audit-quality freight rate and carrier selection details:
  • Automated carrier/mode selection and rate calculations
  • User-friendly tools for rate and routing selection rule maintenance
  • Configurable requests
    • Rate - provides full rate details for the carrier specified
    • Rate and Route - provides ranked list of carriers and associated rate details
    • Optimization - combines shipments where possible to reduce freight spending and creates multi-stops and aggregations
• Optimization to identify consolidation opportunities:
  • Aggregation - simple consolidation of shipments with the same "ship from" and "ship to" and same or overlapping pickup/delivery windows
  • Multi-stop - combines shipments with different "ship from" and "ship to" locations into a single carrier route with multiple pickups and/or drop offs
• Controlled carrier ranking and selection through configurable Routing Guides:
  • Price - lowest cost
  • Rank - user-defined rankings
  • Split Source - shipment allocation to carriers based on percentages
  • Split Source/Price - allocation for some lanes on percentages and others on lowest cost
  • Split Source/Rank - allocation for some lanes on percentages and others on user-defined carrier ranking
  • Ability to define the available capacity for a given carrier in a region for each day, which avoids time spent tendering to carriers without capacity
• Selection of a specific Routing Guide based on specific vendors or customers
• AP/Sell, AR/Buy configuration
• Sell rate calculation options:
  • Percent markup
  • Flat fee markup
  • Discrete sell rates
• Transit calculation - calculate required pickup and/or delivery date and time by using multiple factors:
  • hours of operation
  • drive break times
  • miles
  • number of miles per hour driven
• Tendering routes to a carrier:
  • Tendering options:
    • Automated tendering after a carrier assignment
    • User interface for manual tendering
  • Messages that are sent to carriers use predefined formats and communication methods/protocols such as X12 EDI
  • Non-EDI-enabled carriers can take advantage of e-mail alerts
  • Sequential tendering - upon carrier rejection or a timeout, the shipment automatically tenders to the next carrier in the ranked carrier list
• Carrier accepts or rejects a shipment:
  • Carriers who are not EDI-enabled can use a Web-based user interface to perform the accept and reject processes
  • EDI-enabled carriers can reply with an accept or reject response
• Carrier route modifications and cancellations - updated tender and tender cancellation messages are sent to the carrier
• Carrier e-mail alerts: Tender, Route Canceled, Tender Canceled, Route Modified
• Reporting:
  • Shipment Detail Report - details buy and sell rate by shipment as well as other key data for each shipment
  • Carrier Route Detail Report - carrier, total freight cost, optimal carrier information and other key data for each route
  • Bill of Lading - Standard document for each shipment
  • Master Bill of Lading - Standard document covering the entire route

This guide provides details on:

• Ensuring that required data is set up to use TM
• Configuring configuration rules that drive shipment and carrier route processing
• Configuring carriers' hours of operation and time zones for use in the tender time-out process
• Understanding the modification workflow when updates are received for shipments and carrier routes
• Configuring rating and routing rules that identify the optimal available carrier to transport the shipment
• Automating the carrier selection and freight rate calculation process
• Optimizing shipments into the most effective carrier routes
• Providing visibility to shipment and carrier route data
• Automating and managing the tendering of the route to the carrier through sequential tendering to ranked potential carriers
• Using tools to manually override automated processing to assign carriers, select alternate carriers, tender shipments or routes, cancel routes, and update freight charges
• Monitoring activity through system-generated event-driven alerts
• Providing carrier access and visibility to routes
• Supporting EDI and non-EDI carriers
• Accessing available reports