Namita Sachan - Warehouse Management with SAP S/4HANA: Embedded and Decentralized EWM

More than 2,000 companies in various industries across more than 65 countries already use SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) for their warehouses.

SAP EWM is a best-of-breed solution that is integral to building an intelligent warehouse, covering a broad range from small warehouses to high-end automated warehouses (including production supply warehouses, distribution centers, and transit warehouses). It optimizes core warehouse processes; simplifies and automates redundant or complex process steps; enhances visibility in warehouse operations through integration with other applications, such as SAP Transportation Management via the new advanced shipping and receiving and SAP Manufacturing Execution, or global track-and-trace software; and increases engagement and user productivity by integrating wearables, mobile devices, and modern radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology with SAP EWM.

With SAP S/4HANA 1909, we bridged the feature gaps between decentralized EWM on SAP S/4HANA and the standalone SAP EWM 9.5. Since then, we worked on further enhancing the user experience, as well as offering new functions and scenarios to provide easier and more efficient tools to fit customer needs and improve resource utilization. For example, a noted highlight of the SAP S/4HANA 2020 release was the integration of SAP EWM with just-in-time (JIT) supply to production, which covers the internal replenishment process for JIT in production supply for the automotive industry. With the release of SAP S/4HANA 2020 Feature Pack 1, our greatest feature was the SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM)-SAP EWM integration (referred to as advanced shipping and receiving) which leverages the SAP TM freight order for SAP EWM operations instead of the transportation unit. In our latest release, SAP S/4HANA 2021, we continued expanding our integration capabilities, and brought many innovative functionalities and improvements to SAP EWM, both for the decentralized EWM and embedded EWM options, such as the following:

• Plant maintenance integration
  With this feature, you can manage the material components that you need for plant maintenance with SAP EWM. You also have full transparency throughout the maintenance process.

• Manufacturing execution system (MES)-driven staging (SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud)
  You can now use MES-driven staging to be more flexible for fulfilling staging requirements for a manufacturing order, if youve integrated your SAP S/4HANA system with an MES.

• Moving sample stock to quality inspection
  On the quality management side, you can now split sample stock from quality inspection stock for a quality inspection. If the stock is packed into handling units (HUs), you can round the sample size to avoid needing to unpack the HU to take the sample.

• CDS views for storage bins
  CDS views are de-facto standard for SAP development, and they enable convenient extraction of data for storage space utilization. We have enriched the SAP EWM virtual data model with key figures for storage. With this feature, you can view some aggregated data relevant to storage bins. This will be the baseline for analytical capabilities like SAP Analytics Cloud.