Excel lists, email attachments, outdated rates: maintaining freight rates in SAP systems costs many companies time and effort. With new features in Carrier Cloud for SAP, freight costs are now available in a structured format early in the process – always up to date and without any manual maintenance effort.
If you want to accurately estimate shipping costs, you need up-to-date freight rates directly in the system. In practice, that is precisely one of the biggest challenges. Entering and maintaining freight rates in SAP systems is a time-consuming and error-prone process in many companies.
The reason: Forwarders and parcel services use a wide variety of pricing models, surcharges, and services, all of which must be accurately reflected in the IT system. In addition, freight rates and their components change regularly. Therefore, they need to be continuously updated – and are often only available in one's own SAP systems with significant manual effort, if at all.
Especially in multi-carrier environments with many transport service providers, this effort quickly multiplies.
This is exactly where the new features in the multi-carrier shipping software Carrier Cloud for SAP come into play. AEB has expanded the solution to include freight rate management features. This allows you to calculate freight costs based on your individual freight agreements with forwarders and parcel services and use them directly in the SAP system.
This is made possible by seamlessly connecting ready-made integrations with systems like SAP S/4HANA®, SAP TM, SAP ECC, SAP EWM, or via SAP BTP. Freight costs are available early on, in a structured and consistent manner, directly within your logistics processes.
A typical example: For shipping orders that have already been processed, the freight costs can be calculated and transferred to the respective SAP systems.
In addition, the new features make it easy to compare rates for select carriers. You can determine the shipping services available from a selected carrier – including prices and delivery times – at any early stage of the process.
The result: You gain early insight into your shipping options and can better weigh costs, services, and delivery times against each other before making a decision.
Perhaps the biggest advantage lies in the background: AEB ensures that the freight rates needed for the calculation are always up-to-date. This relieves you of the often time-consuming task of rate maintenance and ensures consistent, reliable freight costs across all use cases.
How this works depends on the transportation provider:
"Many companies want to ensure they can reliably evaluate transportation costs in the process, not just understand them afterwards. With the new features in Carrier Cloud for SAP, we're making freight rates much easier to use in SAP systems,” explains Andrej Grohar, Product Manager at AEB. “This creates tangible added value, especially in complex multi-carrier environments with many transport service providers: less manual work, greater visibility, and a better data foundation for operational and business decisions.”
Freight rates no longer have to be a constant concern in your IT department. With the enhanced freight rate management in Carrier Cloud for SAP, you can outsource the time-consuming task of rate maintenance to AEB and, in return, receive up-to-date, consistent freight costs directly within your SAP processes. This provides transparency for cost control, a solid foundation for analysis, and – through rate shopping – greater clarity right from the start when choosing the right shipping option.
For more information about this solution, go to Multi-carrier shipping in SAP® and Freight Cost Management from AEB.
