In the standard process flow for SAP S/4HANA Transportation Management (TM), the creation of a freight order is preceded by several key documents. An Order-based Transportation Requirement (OTR) is generated from a source business document (e.g., a sales order) to represent the transportation demand within the TM module. Subsequently, the system creates Freight Units (FUs) based on the OTR. These FUs are the fundamental, smallest plannable units. During the transportation planning phase, either manually or automatically, these freight units are assigned to a capacity document, which for road or rail transport is the freight order. Thus, both the OTR and the FU are direct predecessors in the document flow that results in a freight order.

B. Sales order: While a sales order initiates the logistics process, the direct predecessor document within the TM module is the Order-based Transportation Requirement (OTR), making it a more precise answer.

D. Shipment: A shipment is a document from the classic SAP Logistics Execution Transportation (LE-TRA) module. In an embedded TM scenario, the freight order replaces the LE-TRA shipment, it is not a predecessor.

1. SAP S/4HANA 2023 Help Portal

"Freight Unit": "A freight unit is a set of goods that are transported together across the entire transportation chain... The system creates freight units from order-based transportation requirements (OTRs) or delivery-based transportation requirements (DTRs)." This establishes the OTR as a predecessor to the FU.

2. SAP S/4HANA 2023 Help Portal

"Freight Order": "A freight order is a document that contains all the information required for the execution of a transportation process. During transportation planning

you create freight orders to transport the goods specified in your freight units." This confirms that freight units are the direct input for creating freight orders.

3. SAP S/4HANA 2023 Help Portal

"Integration of Sales Orders (SD)": "When you save a sales order in Sales and Distribution (SD)

the system automatically creates an order-based transportation requirement (OTR) in TM based on the data in the sales order." This clarifies the relationship between the sales order and the OTR

positioning the OTR as the immediate TM-relevant predecessor.