Transportation cross-docking(Part III)

Transportation cross-docking supports the consolidation of deliveries from different supplying warehouses into common shipments to a customer or to another receiving warehouse. This consolidation can take place at one or more intermediate warehouses along the route to the destination; you can forward the goods at intermediate warehouses without needing to store or pack them (in essence, moving the goods “across the dock” from receiving to shipping).

The following illustration shows the data flow for cross-docking of sales orders:

Implementation Considerations

In Customizing, you must:

·        Specify which plants can act as cross-docking warehouses

·        Assign storage locations to each supplying plant to represent the stock at each cross-docking warehouse

·        Assign MRP areas to cross-docking storage locations to prevent stock at intermediate warehouses from being considered as available for planning

SAP delivers preconfigured movement types for cross-docking. However, you can create additional movement types in Customizing for Materials Management.

You can define cross-docking partners in Customizing for Partner Master Data. This specifies the storage locations in the source warehouse to be used when cross-docking goods are posted to a cross-docking target warehouse. If the system detects such a partner in a delivery document, it assigns the appropriate cross-docking goods movement type to the document.

The decision as to whether a shipment requires cross-docking can be made in one of the following places:

·        SAP CRM system during transportation route determination

·        A BAdI in the ERP system

·        The warehouse system

The cross-docking information determined in SAP CRM and the ERP system is passed as a proposal to the warehouse system, which can make the final decision about the next cross-docking steps

Source SAP.com