Perspective Management

Logistics involves the buying and selling of transportation services to move goods from one destination to another. In Oracle Transportation Management, the distinction between buying transportation services and selling them is called perspective. Your perspective is largely influenced by the role that you play in the supply chain; for example, customer, 3PL (third party logistics), carrier or service provider, and so on.

A buyer of transportation is anyone who needs to purchase transportation for a shipment. Buyers are often shippers, but could also be a third-party service provider or broker. A seller of transportation is anyone who wants to sell transportation capacity and is looking for a buyer. Sellers are often carriers, but could also be a third-party service provider or broker.

For example, if you are a customer placing an order and need to move freight from one place to another, you would have a buy perspective. If you are an intermediary such as a 3PL or agent that takes the order from a customer and arranges transportation, you may have both a buy and sell perspective. In this case, your sell perspective relates to the services that you provide to the customer while the buy perspective corresponds to the services that you may have to purchase from a transportation carrier or service provider. In this example, the service provider/carrier would have a sell perspective. As you can see, the buy/sell perspective is largely driven by your role and how you do business within the supply chain.

Involved Party Rules

Involved Parties identify the contacts that have an interest in business objects such as orders, shipments, bills, and invoices. Each contact is assigned an Involved Party Qualifier that defines the ownership role on the object. For example, the qualifiers specify the order owner, the logistics planner, supplier, bill to/from, remit to/from, and so on. Since business objects are usually related to each other in some form, for example, an order has a shipment and a shipment usually has a bill. Oracle Transportation Management must ensure that the appropriate Involved Parties are associated with each object as they are created. Therefore, Oracle Transportation Management follows specific rules for copying Involved Parties across objects to achieve the appropriate perspective and ensure that the right contact is identified throughout the life cycle of business objects in the system.

Itineraries and Rates

Oracle Transportation Management supports the buy versus sell perspective for rates and itineraries. You can create distinct buy and sell rates to help you manage your cost versus revenue. Having separate buy and sell itineraries and shipments lets you carefully manage the communication and visibility of routing information. For example, your customer may only care to see that their order is being shipped door-to-door even though the order may take a route with various stops along with way.

These business objects have a Perspective field that you can use to assign a BUY, SELL, or BOTH value to help model the appropriate buy and sell perspectives.

Orders and Shipments

Perspective defines how different Involved Parties view a shipment and its orders. For example:

• Sell shipments are viewed by both the planner and the order owner
• Buy shipments are viewed only by the planner

Oracle Transportation Management accommodates planning versus customer perspective through the use of multiple domains. Orders and sell shipments should reside in customer domains. Buy shipments should reside in a planning domain which has visibility to each of the customer domains. The planning domain is used by the planner to build both the buy and sell side shipments.

Oracle Transportation Management can create a buy or sell (perspective) shipment depending on the action that you select. The process for building these shipments is the same; however, the itineraries and rates that are used in the planning process must match the same perspective as the shipment your are building. For example, if you build a buy shipment, Oracle Transportation Management evaluates rates and itineraries that have a BUY or ALL perspective.

Also note that new shipments are always saved in specific domains to achieve the appropriate buy and sell perspective. For example, a sell shipment is saved in the domain of its order whereas a buy shipment is always saved in the domain in which it is created (the planner's domain). The assumption is that customers that place orders will have their own domain in which they create orders. The shipments that a customer can review should be sell shipments.

Buy and sell shipments enable Oracle Transportation Management to support the unique transportation intermediary business processes of Logistics Service Providers ( LSP).

Customer orders in Oracle Transportation Management can be associated with two sets of shipments:

• Buy or Operational Shipments
• Sell or Commercial Shipments

To illustrate this concept, consider the example below. In this scenario, there is one customer order with one sell shipment (door-to-door) and three buy shipments for each physical transportation leg.

Now consider the example in the next figure where there are two customer orders with independent door-to-door sell shipments and an overlapping buy shipment for the port-to-port transportation leg.

The value of buy and sell shipments are not limited to international shipping scenarios. The ports in the above example could be replaced with cross-docks or consolidation centers, and the ocean leg could be replaced with a linehaul truckload shipment to demonstrate a domestic example.

Buy and sell shipments provide the LSP with tremendous flexibility in the ways they manage their operations and provide information to their customers. The commercial and operational business processes can be uncoupled for increased internal efficiency and information control. Citing the examples in the figures above, we will examine the impact of buy and sell shipments in the day-to-day use of Oracle Transportation Management.

Rating & Quoting

• Use sell side customer rates to calculate the service revenue associated with a customer order prior to execution
• Use buy side rates to calculate the transportation costs associated with a customer order prior to execution
• Sell and buy rates can be related or independent; for example, sell door-to-door and buy point-to-point

Planning & Execution

• Buy shipments can be optimized for multiple customer orders as illustrated with the common port to port shipment above
• Reduce transportation costs by consolidating orders
• Manage the execution of buy shipments as a single process - tendering, booking, status updates, in-transit modifications

Visibility

• Use sell shipments for customer visibility
• Use buy shipments for internal operations visibility
• Control the level of operational information provided to customers

Settlement

• Use sell shipments for customer billing
• Use buy shipments for service provider freight payment

Value

• Manage the unique LSP intermediary requirement of simultaneously managing commercial and operational transportation activities
• Consolidate operations across customer orders for planning, optimization, execution and freight payment while maintaining the customer independent quoting, visibility and billing processes