Shipping notifications or ASNs are intended to notify your customers of upcoming deliveries. For this to work, however, a number of requirements must be met. SAP systems in particular do not necessarily contain all the required data in the outgoing messages. Here you can find out what problems you encounter when working with SAP and how you can solve them.
ASN stands for Advanced Shipping Notice and is the shipping notification. In German, it is often referred to as Lieferavis. It is an electronic document that contains information on upcoming shipments and is sent via EDI (electronic data interchange).
A supplier uses the ASN to inform its customer about an upcoming delivery. This happens either because the supplier wants to give his customer the opportunity, to be prepared for a delivery. The customer can then prepare or reserve the storage locations, for example. In many cases, ASNs are also used by the Customer specified or desired. In the automotive industry, this is even common practice.
Automotive manufacturers (also known as original equipment manufacturers or OEMs) often work with very precise specifications as to how they must be supplied. Such OEM specifications can refer to the fact that they want to be supplied in sequence. Even more common, however, are specifications for electronic data exchange. ASNs are also affected by this.
If you use SAP, you can always generate an ASN. SAP generally works with its own IDoc file format here. This message is then transferred to a standardized format (e.g. EDIFACT) via an EDI converter or an EDI system. This allows you to establish secure communication with your customers, even with an SAP system.
The ASN that SAP generates is normally (see special case SAP TM below) a message with the IDoc type SHPMNT05.
The first problem you may encounter here is that SHPMNT05 contains too little or not the right data. You must therefore enrich the IDoc with additional data in order to meet your customers' requirements.
This may mean that you have to set up these adjustments per customer or per different specification so that the data is also automatically included in the IDoc message.
When transferring the data from the IDoc file to the EDI system or the EDI converter, the data from your SAP system must be processed in accordance with the standard used.
The most common standards are EDIFACT or ANSI X12 (mainly used in North America) and are used to transmit data in a structured way.
To ensure that the outgoing data in your IDoc messages is correctly transferred to the standard, you need so-called mappings. Put simply, this involves determining which data field in your message is written in which form and in which field of the standardized EDI message. Your SAP system cannot do this automatically - especially not according to the specifications of your OEM customers. There are mappings in the EDI system for this purpose.
Unfortunately, too many SAP users are unaware of this. But for SAP users who rely on SAP TM (Transportation Management) for transport management, there is another issue: instead of IDoc, the system uses the XML format. The data format with which your ASN is transmitted is therefore different. Companies that are just introducing SAP TM therefore have to deal with the fact that they have to be able to process a completely new data format.
This means that both the enrichment with additional data and the topic of mapping can cause new problems. If you switch to SAP TM, you can no longer use the mappings that were set up for the IDocs for the XML files.
Regardless of the data format used (IDoc or XML), you can add the necessary functionalities to your SAP system. You can set up both the enrichment of the data and the mappings yourself accordingly.
However, it must be clearly stated here: Only embark on this endeavor if you are sure that
Alternatively, you can contact an SAP consulting company. As long as they are familiar with the required processes (especially if you supply OEMs), they should be able to provide you with the right solution.
If you are looking for a cheaper and probably smoother solution in the long term, you can also rely on SAP extensions, which are available as ready-made add-ons. Such ready-made solutions have the advantage that you have little work to do yourself (installation is usually quick and easy) and someone else ensures for you that all requirements are met.
