Oracle Transportation Management:

What is OTM:

Oracle Transportation Management (OTM), enables organizations to meet their customer service and logistics objectives by managing all orders and shipments, both domestic and international, as a single, integrated global logistics business process across the multi-enterprise supply chain.

OTM is structured in such a way that three servers support the formatting, processing, and storing of data.

Webserver : Format - Formats the data from OTM.
Application ServerLogic:Logic - Process data in OTM.
Database :Data - Stores data in OTM.


OTM’s global, multi-domain data model enables multiple customers secure access to their individual information.
User access is granted through the use of a User Role. A User Role controls the data each user can access as well as functional security for that user within OTM. With the appropriate setup, a user can toggle between multiple roles without logging in and out of OTM.

Buy Vs Sell Shipment:

–Buy shipments : A shipper purchases the transportation from a carrier.
–Sell shipments : Used by third party logistics (3PL) providers, for example.
The 3PL plans their customer’s transportation, and then bills their customers for that service.


•Buy shipment: Client ' X ' Wholesalers tenders freight to Carrier 'A'. Carrier 'A' then bills 'X' Wholesalers for the service of moving the freight.
•Sell shipment: Client 'X' 3PL plans the transportation for Shipper 123 and then bills Shipper 123 for planning the movement of their freight.
Because of these two types of shipments, often you need to define whether a rate, for example, is a buy perspective or a sell perspective. Rates that are buy perspective are used for creating buy shipments, whereas rates that are a sell perspective are used for billing purposes.
It is only who is buying or selling transportation services that matter. E.g., As a shipper, you can sell goods on a buy shipment.


OTM Domains :
Within the database, OTM consists of one or more client defined domains. The domains share the database tables, but the domains own the rows. This defines each domain’s access.
Different users can see and use different data. For example,
•Service provider A can only see their rates and shipments.
•The supplier domain can only see their purchase orders.


Public Domain:
The public domain contains general information, such as currencies and country codes.
When installing OTM, certain information is always installed into the public domain, other information can optionally be installed, but you can also add your own specific information. This means that the public data you see in this class might not be available as public data in your installation of OTM.


What Domains to Create :
You set up domains to meet your business needs. For example, you may define domains by types of users.
•Service provider domain
•Sales domain
•Supplier domain


Child Domains :
You can define what access a subdomain has to the parent domain. By default, a parent domain can see all child data but not vice versa.
When domains are created, you can specify the amount of default data to be copied to the new domain. In a standalone domain, OTM copies all of the default data to that domain. In a reference domain, the default data is not copied; OTM points to an existing standalone domain to access the default data

What is OTM Status?

Throughout OTM, certain business objects have statuses associated with them.
Statuses consist of:
•Status type : -Represents a class of actions that can occur during the OTM process.
•Status value: -Associated with a status type and represents specific actions for the record.

Examples of business objects with statuses include location, order base, order release, shipment, and invoice.

•When an order release is created, OTM assigns certain status types and status values to it.
•As the order release is used for creating shipments and other OTM processes, OTM changes the status values accordingly.


Business Scenario
•You create multi-stop shipments for multiple orders of sporting goods, all originating in Chicago, and with a destination of either Atlanta or Boston.
•Shipments can be transported by the truckload carriers, ABC Trucking or XYZ Truck Lines.
•You tender the shipments to the selected carriers.
•Acting for the service provider, you will enter events against the shipments.
•You will match and approve the invoice and allocate the shipment costs back to the orders.

What is Shipment:
•Represents the movement of freight from one location to another.
•OTM creates shipments from order releases.

•An order release states the problem: what is the cheapest way to transport goods given these constraints?
•OTM presents the answer in the form of a shipment.


Once a shipment is created from an order release(s), you can monitor shipment activity, modify shipments, create shipments and shipment templates, and perform various shipment related tasks including:
•Tender shipments
•Change service provider
•Change equipment group
•Change arrival and departure times
•Add pickup and delivery appointment times


A planning parameter set contains planning parameters. Each planning parameter controls how OTM builds shipments and related actions.
Creating a new planning parameter set and assigning it to your domain ensures OTM uses the proper parameters to meet your business processes during planning and optimization.

What is Manual Modification?
To minimize manual changes to the shipment plan, it is important to keep your business rules and parameters up-to-date in OTM so that OTM makes the optimal decision for your business process.
•For example, if your distribution center changes its hours from a 24/7 operation to hours of Monday – Friday 7:00AM – 4:00PM, you need to update the calendar so OTM plans feasible shipments.
An alternative to modifying shipments is to modify you order constraints and re-plan your orders.


Shipment Actions :

Shipment actions allow you to add or change data on shipments,Some actions can be performed on several shipments at once, and other actions can be performed on only one shipment at a time.
Certain actions can only be performed at certain times based on the status; for example, you cannot choose the action Tender Shipment when the shipment is already tendered. But you can choose the action Re-Transmit Tender.


What is a Shipment Event?:
Service providers and other third parties can send information about shipments to OTM with a shipment event.

What is Tendering:
•When a shipment is tendered, OTM sends a notice to the service provider with an offer to move the cargo.
•There are different types of tendering in OTM:
–Tender to a specific service provider
–Spot bid tender
–Broadcast tender


Freight Payment
•The shipper buys the transportation services from the service provider.
•The service provider sends the shipper an invoice for the amount owed.

Customer Billing
Customer billing is used with sell shipments where the service provider sells shipments to customers.

Freight Payment Process :
As a shipper, you get many invoices from your service providers.
Before you pay them, you will want to:
•Bring the invoice information into OTM.
•Match the invoice to the shipment listing all the specifics for this invoice.
•Compare the requested amount on the invoice to the planned amount on the shipment and decide if you approve the invoice for payment.
•Send a voucher for the approved amount to the service provider via your accounts payable system.


What is Rate Manager?
Rates are comprised of four key components:
•Rate distance: Determines the distance from one location to another.
•Rate service: Determines the time required to transport goods from one location to another.
•Rate offering: Contains contract level data specific to a service provider.
•Rate record: Contains specific costing data from one location to another

Note: for more information go through the OTM userguide.