Transportation Management with SAP LES

13
Other Shipment Functions
13.2 Stages
Stages were already mentioned in the introduction as a special feature in shipment
documents. If you work with the follow-up process, shipment cost settlement, you
must use stages. Because the shipment document can consist of several delivery
documents and different ship-to parties, you can map the legs that are to be covered
in stages.
For example, by defining an itinerary for the ship-to parties you specify that the
leg starts at your shipping point and ends at the first ship-to party. The second
leg starts at the first and ends at the second ship-to party, and so on. If you load
at more than one shipping point, for instance, the first leg may start at the first
shipping point and end at the second shipping point. The second leg starts to the
ship-to party and therefore starts at the second shipping point. If you handle the
transport with your customer via cross-docking stations, the ship-to party of your
delivery is the cross-docking station (also referred to as the load transfer point). If
you handle export business, the first leg can run to the border crossing where the
second leg starts. The second leg then ends at the last border crossing and the last
leg runs to the final ship-to party.
You can assign specific information to each stage or already define a route. You
can use a specific forwarding agent for each stage. This enables you to work with
different forwarding agents for one transport. You can schedule the stages separately,
as well as record weight, volume, and distances. Stages can be relevant for
shipment cost settlements.
You can also assign the respective delivery documents to each stage. This enables
you to distribute your shipment costs to any delivery document, if necessary. This
settlement is usually used if you have your own vehicles and you want to allocate
your costs to the deliveries.
Each stage has a leg indicator. It indicates whether the stage is a preliminary, main,
subsequent, direct, or return leg. You already know these terms from the shipment
type. In this chapter, they have the same meaning.
You go to the stages by selecting the Stages tab in the shipment document (for an
example, see Figure 13.11).
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