SAP_TM - New Condition For Means Of Transport And Vehicle Type Determination.

SAP_TM – New condition for means of transport and vehicle type determination.

Smarter Planning Starts with the Right Rules

In SAP Transportation Management (TM), knowing how goods move is just as important as knowing where they're going. The Means of Transport (MTr) and Equipment Type Determination feature empowers logistics planners to automate and standardize the selection of trucks, locomotives, and containers — all driven by configurable business rules.

This blog walks you through how to define the conditions that power this determination and how the system puts them to work across your planning processes.

What Is MTr/Equipment Type Determination?

At its core, this feature uses business rules to automatically determine:

The appropriate means of transport (e.g., truck, train)
The appropriate equipment type (truck type, locomotive type, or container type)

These determined values feed directly into various planning processes, making your transportation execution more consistent and efficient.

Step 1: Define Your Condition

The foundation of this feature is a condition of one of the following types:

/SCMTMS/MTR_ET_DET — Determine Means of Transport/Equipment Types

The conditions are built on a decision table framework. Several access definitions are available out of the box (all starting with /SCMTMS/MTR*), including:

Source Location
Destination Location
Transportation Mode

You can remove any access definitions you don't need, keeping your condition lean and focused.

Step 2: Build Your Decision Table

Inside the decision table, you define rules — each row representing one rule. For each rule, you specify:

Input values — based on your selected data access definitions (e.g., specific source/destination locations or transportation modes). If no input value is specified, all values are considered.
Output values — the means of transport and/or equipment types to be determined. Output values are mandatory.

Input values can be defined flexibly using:

Multiples include and exclude conditions
Operators or patterns (or both)
Quantities are automatically converted, so unit mismatches are handled for you.

Step 3: Validate Your Rules

Before going live, the system provides several consistency and validity checks, including:

Whether the means of transport and equipment type combination is valid
Whether the equipment type is relevant for planning

These checks help ensure your rules are logically sound before they influence real planning runs.

Prerequisites Before Going Live

Before the determination can work end-to-end, ensure the following are in place:

Equipment Types: The Restricted Use in Planning checkbox must be deselected for your equipment types. Configure this under: Customizing for Transportation Management → Master Data → Resources → General Settings → Define Equipment Groups and Equipment Types

Note: Only truck types, locomotive types, and container types are supported.

Freight Unit Type: Activate determination and reference your condition in your freight unit type. Configure under: Customizing Transportation Management → Planning → Freight Unit → Define Freight Unit Types This is required for determination during freight unit creation or modification.
Planning Profile: Activate determination and reference your condition in your planning profile. This is required for dynamic determination.

Important: You must start your planning session with this planning profile, or assign it to your business document type, for the setting to take effect.

How Determination Works at Runtime

The system considers the following input criteria to determine the appropriate means of transport and equipment type:

Source and destination location data
Service level (sales)
Payer and ship-to party

Determination is performed at each requested stage where no means of transport is defined yet. If no equipment type is defined, the system also attempts to find one compatible with the existing means of transport. If both are already defined, the determination is skipped.

The determined values are copied into the stage.

Two Determination Modes

Automatic Determination (at Freight Unit Level)

This mode triggers when a freight unit is created or an unplanned freight unit is changed. The determined values are saved in the following fields:

Preferred Means of Transport
Preferred Equipment Type
Preferred Equipment Group

These fields are visible in:

Freight unit stage list and hierarchy in the Transportation Cockpit
Combined freight unit/package unit stage list and hierarchy in the Transportation Cockpit
Stage view of the freight unit user interface

If multiple results are returned, the first result is used.

Key behaviors to know:

The Origin of Entry field tells you whether a value was manually entered, system-determined, or sourced from a default route.
Re-determination is triggered when relevant fields change (locations, product, weight, service level, or quantities).
Manual changes to means of transport, equipment type, and equipment group are protected from automatic re-determination.
When creating a freight order from a freight unit (or assigning a freight unit to an existing freight order), the system copies the means of transport, equipment type, and equipment group into the freight order — but only if no value exists yet. Existing values are never overwritten. Incompatibility issues trigger a warning message.
When assigning freight units to a container unit (or creating one from a freight unit stage), the system copies the container type of the first assigned freight unit into the container unit.

Dynamic Determination (On-the-Fly)

This mode runs just before a planning engine is called and serves as a fallback when:

A previous determination provided no result, or
The freight unit stage doesn't contain a means of transport or equipment type

Dynamic determination is skipped if:

The relevant fields already contain a value
You have manually changed one of them
The Means of Transport field in the freight unit stage hierarchy of the Transportation Cockpit already contains a value

Dynamic determination is supported in the following planning processes:

Planning Process

Lane, distance and duration determination

Transportation requirement routing and scheduling

Load consolidation

Vehicle scheduling and routing optimization

Generation of transportation proposals

Extensibility: Available BAdIs

For advanced scenarios, SAP TM provides three Business Add-Ins (BAdIs) to extend the determination logic:

BAdI	Purpose
BAdI: Adjustment of Means of Transport Determination	Change input data and results directly in the determination engine
BAdI: Adjustment of Means of Transport Determination Results	Change input data and results during planning operations (called from planning engines)
BAdI: Relevance Check for Means of Transport Determination	Check the relevance of freight units for means of transport determination

These BAdIs are available under: Customizing for Transportation Management → Business Add-Ins (BAdIs) for Transportation Management → Planning → Means of Transport Determination

Summary

The MTr and Equipment Type Determination feature in SAP TM brings rule-based intelligence to your transportation planning. By defining flexible conditions, building decision tables, and leveraging both automatic and dynamic determination modes, you can ensure the right equipment is always matched to the right shipment — automatically, consistently, and at scale.

Example:

Condition Type: