4.2    SAP Extended Warehouse Management Basics

SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) is a complete, best-of-breed, warehouse management solution that allows small, medium, and large businesses to run more efficient warehouse processes. It supports production and distribution center operations. Since its first release in 2005, SAP has continued to enhance the functionality to keep up with new business requirements and changes in industry trends via a traditional release management protocol, which is currently at release 9.4.

In this section, we’ll focus primarily on EWM functionality and deployment options in conjunction with SAP S/4HANA, and we’ll address the following commonly issues:

4.2.1    SAP Extended Warehouse Management Deployment Options

With SAP S/4HANA, starting in the 1610 release, EWM is offered embedded in the SAP S/4HANA core. This allows for the EWM functionality to be leveraged without interfacing data. The traditional EWM offering was in the SAP SCM product offering and not the traditional SAP Business Suite. A number of data elements and technical infrastructure requirements were needed to send data, both master and transactional, back and forth from the traditional SAP Business Suite and SAP SCM. These interfaces and technical considerations have been removed with the embedded EWM offering in SAP S/4HANA.

With release 1610, both basic warehousing and extended warehousing are running on a common code base embedded in SAP S/4HANA. The embedded EWM approach as a deployment option supports warehouse management operations with simplified integration to SAP S/4HANA business processes.

A decentralized deployment option will continue to be available. This option provides proven customer value such as high-velocity, high-volume data-processing distribution centers. This solution also safeguards EWM data when existing decentralized EWM customers decide to migrate their SAP ERP system to SAP S/4HANA. The decentralized option is often used to allow warehouses to operate decoupled from the core IT platform. These decentralized warehouse management solutions allow the warehouse to operate during central instance downtimes, planned or unplanned, and allow for a localized implementation.

In embedded EWM in the SAP S/4HANA core, the warehouse functionality is grouped in two sets. You need to activate the usage of advanced functionality within the configuration. The two options are basic Warehouse Management and advanced Warehouse Management and are listed in groups of the same names.

4.2.2    Basic Warehouse Management

Basic Warehouse Management covers the functionality offered in the traditional SAP Business Suite. It supports a number of warehousing processes and has been implemented by numerous SAP clients. Business processes such as bin-level inventory management, picking and shipping to customers, receiving and putaways of material from vendor, and interplant inbounds are supported, in addition to internal bin level warehouse management tasks. Over the years, SAP has evolved the EWM offering in the warehousing space to include more advanced functions. Let’s explore the basic Warehouse Management a little further:

4.2.3    Advanced Warehouse Management

Advanced Warehouse Management covers all of the same functions just listed but includes an entirely new suite of business processes and functionality offerings. The advanced Warehouse Management setting activates all of the EWM functions offered in the SAP SCM suite.

Companies need to determine just how complex their warehouse operations are to determine which whether they need basic or advanced Warehouse Management. If the operations are somewhat simplistic and generally covered by the preceding list, then the basic Warehouse Management setting will suffice. If the business requirements are much more complex and optimized, the advanced Warehouse Management (i.e., EWM) functionality should be used. As is often the case with software, if you choose the more complex advanced Warehouse Management setting, it provides much more functionality but requires more data, more transactions, and more process rigor to sustain.

Let’s explore advanced Warehouse Management a little more in detail:

You can select either option (see Figure 4.4) based on your business requirements using the SAP Customizing Implementation Guide (IMG) at SCM Extended Warehouse ManagementExtended Warehouse ManagementMaster DataAcknowledge Use of Advanced Functions.

Choosing Basic or Advanced Warehousing

Figure 4.4    Choosing Basic or Advanced Warehousing

With the introduction of embedded EWM in SAP S/4HANA, you now have four combinations of warehouse management functionality at your disposal. You can run traditional Warehouse Management functionality, traditional decentralized Warehouse Management, embedded EWM, and decentralized EWM. You can also run all of these combinations in a single SAP S/4HANA client.