Discover SAP Extended Warehouse Management

July 6, 2022

With SAP Extended Warehouse Management, you can orchestrate inbound and outbound processing, as well as the storage and retrieval operations in between.

SAP Extended Warehouse Management

Warehousing operations can no longer succeed as a functional silo focusing solely on internal procedures. You need an integrated, comprehensive logistics solution so you can smoothly run your logistics processes, accelerate order fulfillment cycles, respond quickly to changes.

Many vendors simply integrate disparate existing solutions. However, SAP solutions help your business run better by converging your processes with a dynamic platform strategy to integrate products and technologies. This strategy combines the capabilities of SAP EWM, the SAP Transportation Management application, and SAP Business Network for Logistics with the power of intelligent technologies including the IoT, machine learning, and blockchain. Together, they help you orchestrate warehousing and logistics as part of a compelling, executable vision.

To clarify, a single technology logistics platform from SAP helps you align your logistics processes to operate as a single entity. That means your customers get fast and agile fulfillment experiences. You can also optimize logistics operations, provide integrated analytics and cost visibility, and support growth and scalability to help achieve a low cost of ownership.

Orchestrate Goods Movement and Storage Processes

With SAP EWM, you can orchestrate inbound and outbound processing, as well as the storage and retrieval operations in between. The application helps you automate goods movement and manage inventory, addressing key requirements of complex processes and high-volume warehouses. You can consistently organize and monitor goods movement triggered by processes for:

procurement
shipping
production supply
and receipt and integrate them with quality management, transportation, and foreign-trade compliance.

The application provides visibility into inventory and logistics along with advanced capabilities such as value-added services, kitting, labor planning and management, yard management, and comprehensive analytics.

SAP EWM also includes functions for cross-docking, import and export, quality management, picking from goods receipt, and push deployment. You can integrate the application readily with the latest technologies for:

pick by voice
augmented reality
radio-frequency identification (RFID)
material handling equipment
autonomous vehicles
and warehouse robots.

The SAP Warehouse Operator mobile app can be added to smart devices that employees are familiar with and handle every day to take advantage of additional abilities and speed up the onboarding of resources.

Important to realize thar SAP solutions respond to emerging industry demands in warehousing, periodically introducing leading innovations that leverage cloud computing, Big Data and analytics, and smart warehouse operations.

Intelligently Manage Inbound Processing

Streamline your core inbound processes to optimize receiving and dock management, as well as inventory placement. SAP EWM can help you enhance a wide array of core inbound processes, including:

Receipt and validation for advanced shipping 3notifications (ASNs)
Goods receipt and receipt optimization
Determination for put-away and put-away bins
Internal routing to allow for granular modeling and tracking of movements in the warehouse
Deconsolidation to enable efficient put-away by sorting and packing goods in receiving
Returns management (also for e-commerce) for efficient identification and disposition of returned goods to reinsert them into the supply

chain
Direct receipt from production
Transportation unit management

With SAP EWM, you can schedule and turn around your goods receipts and order returns faster, reduce dock waiting times, and help ensure higher resource productivity while allowing flexible and automated handling of a large volume of items and orders, even as you scale your business.

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Direct Storage and Internal Processing

Optimize the activities that help manage goods in inventory and move them within your warehouse, so you can track them even at the lowest level of detail and improve your facility utilization. In general, SAP EWM helps you direct storage and internal processing, including:

Physical inventory processes and record verification to reduce inventory counting efforts and manage inventory balances on an ongoing basis
Slotting, replenishment, rearrangement, and stock consolidation capabilities to optimize storage and maximize facility utilization
Kitting to stock and value-added services to accelerate speed to shelf and offer customized product kits and personalized deliveries to customers
Automated warehouse billing to allow activity-based electronic billing of warehouse costs to customers and payment to warehouse vendors

.SAP Extended Warehouse Management

Fine-Tune Outbound Processes to Maximize Speed and Agility

Improve customer service, offer faster order turn-around, and reduce your picking, shipping, and billing errors and manual steps. Explore robust and advanced features for outbound processes in the warehouse, including:

Transportation unit management to efficiently manage the flow of vehicles in the warehouse and support shipping and receiving operations
Warehouse order creation, wave management, optimal route and picking bin determination, and optimal work assignment to help ensure timely planning and delivery of customer orders
Picking, packing, staging, loading management, and goods issue
Kitting to customer-specific orders
Direct outbound delivery
Production supply and production staging and consumption to allow synchronized material flows and accurate inventory visibility between the warehouse and production

With SAP EWM, you can improve your overall customer order fulfillment KPIs, reduce delivery lead times, and limit order inaccuracies while scaling to meet higher levels of demand and serve multiple fulfillment channels.

Enable Process Optimization

SAP EWM also offers additional cross-functional features related to material flow, such as opportunistic and planned cross-docking, management of stock-specific units of measure, and labor management. It includes built-in optimization for the creation of work packages, resource assignment, and stock consolidation. You can harness extended functionality for packaging specification and management of batches, serial numbers, catch weight, and dock appointment scheduling.

The application also includes rich cross-functional analytics and traceability. A comprehensive set of implementation tools helps you get up and running and accurately adjust your processes. You can expect sizable reductions to both total cost of operations and total cost of inventory.

The SAP Warehouse Insights solution further allows you to optimize, visualize, and analyze warehouse operations; improve resource utilization; and monitor the real-time status of resources using IoT services.

Automate the Warehouse

The material flow system component of SAP EWM provides direct control and monitoring of automated storage and retrieval systems, as seen in Figure 1. Directly control programmable logic controllers for high-rack storage, small-parts warehousing, shuttle warehousing, and more. The built-in material flow system can helpyou control movement of units in automated systems, manage conveyor segments, and monitor at various levels.

The application also manages material handling equipment for distribution vehicles, sorters, and label applicators. It supports this functionality for pallets, containers, and cartons, as well as pick, pack, and pass technologies.

In effect, your users can flexibly access and execute their tasks across a wide array of mobile devices, including handheld RF terminals, tablets and smartphones, wireless scanners and printers, and wearable devices including voice headsets and smart glasses. This can help you streamline employee engagement and user efficiency by enabling your employees to succeed with technologies they are already familiar with and use in their personal, everyday lives.

Figure 1 – Extended Warehouse Management with Integrated Material Flow System

Leverage Robotics for Flexibility and Resilience

Given that autonomous mobile robots become affordable, there is an increasing demand to leverage them in the warehouse to automate warehouse processes, increase productivity, and deal with disruptions and labor shortages.

The SAP Warehouse Robotics solution is a warehouse automation solution that allows scalable integration with heterogeneous vendors of robots, lowering costs, increasing accuracy, and driving innovation.

Figure 2: Smart Warehousing with SAP Digital Supply Chain and SAP Business Technology Platform

Support Intelligent Warehousing with SAP S/4HANA

SAP Extended Warehouse Management is a part of SAP S/4HANA, which allows you to simplify your IT landscape while enabling speed and performance. You can leverage innovations such as in-memory analytics and innovative user experiences. With SAP EWM, you have the choice of either a decentralized deployment for large and high-volume warehousing or an embedded component for smaller and midsize enterprises. SAP EWM is offered in a cloud deployment model, which further reduces total cost of ownership and offers scalability.

SAP Best Practices packages offer preconfigured solutions and building blocks for SAP EWM, which can accelerate your SAP EWM implementation.

Additionally, SAP offers flexible licensing for deploying SAP EWM as an embedded application, with varying functionality depending on the business requirements.

.SAP Extended Warehouse Management

In reality basic warehouse management focuses on stock transparency and control. It offers features for inventory management, inbound and outbound processing, movement of goods in the warehouse, and reporting. Advanced warehouse management helps you optimize your warehouse processes and adds functionality for material flow control, yard and labor management, value-added services, kitting, cross-docking, and warehouse billing. The two levels serve as stepping stones to supply chain convergence in SAP S/4HANA.

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