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
- Tendering options:
- 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