Published on December 10, 2018 – Michael Augustin, Consultants SAP Yard Logistics (SAP YL)
The festive seasons brings many challenges for the transportation industry as transport volumes peak in the final quarter of the year. One of those most affected during this period will be our dear friend Santa Claus and, although many doubt his existence, we have been wondering how SAP TM and SAP YL could make his life easier.
In our scenario, Santa Claus has a present distribution centre located in the North Pole, where he stores all the gifts through the year until Christmas Eve.
As Santa has a huge wish list to fulfil, he needs optimized transportation planning to ensure the punctual delivery of all presents around the world. Therefore, Santa uses SAP Transportation Management to optimize his transportation planning and routing.
Freight Units reflecting each present from a child’s wish list are automatically planned using the optimizer in SAP TM, resulting in a Freight Order with several stages.
The route starts with the loading of Santa’s sleigh in the present distribution centre, which is reflected as a source location in the first stage on the Freight Order. Through the standard integration to SAP Yard Logistics, a Yard Request is created in SAP YL which serves as an initial planning document for the elves employed in the Christmas Distribution Centre. The Yard Request stores the information about when Santa will be arriving in the yard and e lists all items which need to be loaded onto the sleigh based on the Freight Units from the integrated Freight Order.
After the Yard Request has been released to create a Yard Order, Santa is registered in SAP Yard Logistics, which activates the Yard Order to start the process execution on the yard.
The first task to be executed would be to check whether the sleigh is in good condition and if Rudolph’s nose shines bright enough for the current weather conditions. If not, some extra fairy lights will be needed. This task will be executed by one of the elves working at the distribution centre with the help of the sleigh checker app (formerly: Trailer Checker App ).
Now that the sleigh has been checked, Santa will park his sleigh in front of the Christmas Warehouse, where it will be loaded by Christmas elves, while the reindeers go to one of the fields for a rest.
Once Santa’s sleigh has been loaded, he will harness the reindeer again to the front of his sleigh and move to the check-out area. From there, Santa leaves the Christmas distribution centre to start the delivery of the loaded presents as planned in SAP TM. When leaving, the Yard Order is checked-out, completing the yard execution process in SAP Yard Logistics.
Upon check-out of the Yard Order, LDAP notifications are sent to SAP TM to update the Freight Order. As Santa leaves his loading location to deliver the presents, the statuses Loading End and Departure are set on the Freight Order, which is in execution status In Process until all presents have been delivered. The further monitoring and tracking of Santa’s delivery can be viewed in SAP TM where the Freight Order stages are updated with the delivery of each present.
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