SAP TM Overview: Must-knows to Effectively Manage Transport

What is SAP TM?

SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM) is a standalone application designed to help organizations manage their transportation and logistics requirements in a more efficient, cost-effective manner. With SAP TM, you can manage inbound and outbound domestic as well as international freight movement on a common platform for better visibility and control. It offers solutions for managing transportation demand, consolidating orders and tracking shipments along with providing analytical reports for further process optimization.

Main SAP TM Features

Strategic Freight Management

Sap TM gives you access to advanced analytics to help forecast and simulate situations and needs related to freight procurement. It empowers you to evaluate bids from different shippers and prepare quotes with predictive insight. The automated rate determination tool makes it easy to exchange this information efficiently with logistics partners.

Order Management

Sap TM helps you leverage rule-based orders to manage inbound and outbound orders. All orders and delivery information is automatically integrated with the SAP ERP application. It synchronizes order scheduling and sales to ensure customer delivery commitments are met and manages changes in transportation requirements with real-time responses to procure-to-pay and order-to-cash processes to minimize the risk of delays.

Transportation Planning

SAP TM helps plan and monitor transportation with a choice of manual, automated or map-based dynamic planning functions. You can build pallets using rule-based optimization and visualize load planning for better visibility and seamless movement of goods. Interactive charts and dashboards further simplify driver resource management.

SAP TM Competitors

Oracle Transportation Management

The Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) platform is designed to help companies manage all their transportation activities across different modes of transportation, supply chain stages and geographic areas. OTM can be easily integrated with other supply chain management and finance applications for better management of shipments, rates, transportation orders, billing, claims, etc. In addition, OTM lets you leverage a digital assistant to receive and respond to inquiries 24/7.

Shipwell

Shipwell is a freight management platform aimed at helping shipping and third-party logistics partners streamline their operations. It offers a range of tools and features to help users create quotes, book and track cargo movement in real-time. Shipwell can be easily integrated with eCommerce platforms and other supply chain applications to automate aspects of the shipping process.

Alpega

Alpega is a cloud-based logistics platform that digitizes the supply chain process by connecting brands to logistics service providers. The range of services offered includes modular options for freight procurement, packaging management and warehouse space booking. It helps users gain end-to-end visibility across the supply chain and integrates with other applications to optimize freight costs and automate the logistics process.

SAP May Not Properly Manage Ocean Transportation

SAP is a general TMS, therefore, it is great to manage your overall transportation. However, it may not be specialized in ocean transportation. You might need to find other solutions, like BuyCo’s Container Shipping Platform, to fully cover your container shipping needs. Below are a list of areas that you need to make sure are either covered by your SAP or your Container Shipping Platform:

Features Needed to Manage Your Ocean Transportation

Proper Collaboration features

It makes sense that you cannot give TMS access to all your team members, partners, freight forwarders, and customers because there is a lot of sensitive information in your TMS. However, some Container Shipping Platforms, like BuyCo, provide special access to your partners where you can chat and collaborate on shipments, exchange documents, and view all limited but essential information. To make your Ocean Transportation management as effective as possible, make sure you find a solution that has these collaborative features.

Efficient Container Scheduling and Booking

Many TMSs aren’t connected to all ocean carrier systems. Therefore, you cannot search all the carrier schedules and send the booking. It’s a good idea to take a central platform where you can search and book carrier vessels in one place. When you search schedules, you should be able to instantly find the best schedules for you according to your needs, such as CO2 emissions, cost, ETA, allocations, etc.

Accurate Container Tracking

TMS are of course essential to transportation management, but many cannot all track ocean containers as precisely as you may need. To do this, find a Container Shipping Platform like BuyCo to accurately track your containers. Your solution should be able to tell you the status of your containers in real time, accurate ETD/ETAS, the location of containers at your warehouses and industrial sight, and alert you with exceptions.

Robust Reporting over your Container Shipping

Since the execution of many of your container shipping operations are done outside of your TMS, you may not be able to get the KPIs that are essential to optimizing your ocean operations. In addition to your TMS, you should find a Container Shipping Platform that provides you KPIs like overall volumes, allocation usage, detention & demurrage, CO2 consumption, freight forwarder performance, ocean carrier performance, etc.

ASAP Integration

If you get a Container Shipping Platform along with SAP, you need to ensure that the system integrates seamlessly with SAP since your TMS and is the hub for managing all of your transportation. Container shipping platforms like BuyCo integrate perfectly with SAP. Data entered in SAP can be found in BuyCo and vise-versa.

BuyCo: The Best Solution to Manage Container Shipping along with SAP TM

Proper Collaboration features

SAP TM is a popular transport management solution, but it delivers an incomplete picture on its own. By integrating it with the BuyCo platform you can fill in the gaps and streamline the flow of your logistics.

BuyCo addresses multiple aspects of shipping and logistics management. It brings 95% of all freight carriers, forwarders and partners to a single platform. Information is stored centrally and shared with relevant players to maximize transparency and minimize the margin of error.

BuyCo also gives shippers the tools required to maintain complete control over operations with real-time, multi-sourced tracking information and automated processes to plan shipments, schedule vessels, book carriers, etc. This saves time, boosts productivity and ensures that operations are executed on time, every time.

Lastly, by bringing all logistics partners and communication between them on to a single platform, BuyCo has access to all the information required for operation analysis. This data is presented in the form of detailed reports according to various KPIs so that businesses can take data-driven decisions with confidence.

Automating your shipping systems with BuyCo gives your teams the tools required to be more efficient with their time and resources.