When to use shipment costing?

What if you have to handle daily shipments done by several forwarding agents and they invoice you periodically (i.e. once a month)? What if you want to estimate the transportation costs prior to receiving the invoices from your forwarding agents? What if you want to have visibility which shipment is linked to which invoice from a forwarding agent? When faced with these questions, then it would make sense to consider using shipment costing in SAP R/3.

Introducing shipment costing will involve some very specific system customising data, master data and transactional data.

Regarding system customising data, you need to link the transportation planning point (the organisational entity that is required when creating shipments) to a purchasing organisation (the organisational entity that is required when creating purchase orders).

Regarding master data, you need to know on which basis the forwarding agent will invoice you for the transport of goods. Does the invoice only consists of actual transportation costs, or does it also include some fixed overhead costs per shipment and/or some variable service costs? Are the variable costs based on route information? The more precise the route and pricing master data, the more reliable the calculated estimated invoice value will become.

Regarding transactional data, you need to create a purchase order prior to physical transportation. The dates maintained in the purchase order are important, else the system is not able to distinguish which shipment cost needs to be transferred to which purchase order.

Shipment costing can become very complex when:
a) the basis for pricing differs per forwarding agent
b) the calculation of the price depends on legs determined within routes
c) legs within routes refer to different forwarding agents

To conclude, introducing shipment costing can be beneficial but the implementation and maintenance of the various types of data requires attention from people who are able to handle complex system integration.

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