SAP SCM Planning

Planning the Warehouse?

The concept of planning one’s warehouse is a confusing one to many supply chain professionals. The Extended Warehouse Management module, which has been greatly enhanced with SCM 2007 has brought a lot of emphasis on warehouse planning. Its is not a particularly well known subject and currently (as of June 2007) Wikipedia does not even have an entry on it.

An extended warehouse is actually a third party or external warehouse, also known as an overflow warehouse. SAP’s EWM helps efficiently manage this warehouse. Some of the functionality is as execution and detail oriented as “printer determination” or routing the picking and packing instructions to the correct warehouse. This is definitely not a planning activity and about as execution oriented as one can get. (on the other hand their is functionality that coverts ASNs into inbound delivery notification which is a planning activity) See this post for more details.

http://sapplanning.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/ewm-expected-goods-receipt/

This illustrates that the SAP SCM product is increasingly being developed in both an execution and planning direction. To read more about this see this post.

http://sapplanning.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/sap-scm-vs-apo/

In the SCM configuration tree, EWM is not under APO, but is under SCM, hence the reason for the change in name from APO a few years ago to SCM. To read more about the differences between APO and SCM see this post.

http://sapplanning.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/sap-scm-vs-apo/

Here you can see the functional areas within SCM include Forecasting and Replenishment, Inventory Collaboration Hub (now to be renamed SNC in SCM 2007), Event Management, and Extended Warehouse Management.

Within EWM the following areas are available:

As you can see, very few of these high level descriptions has anything to do with planning.

EWM Capability

EWM does the following things:

• Yard Management
• Physical Inventory
• Stock Replenishment
• Fixed Stock Removal
• Putaway
• Labor Management
• Capacity Checking
• Storage Bin Management
• Storage Control
• RF
• Slotting
• Cross Docking
• Packaging
• Integration with 3PLs
• Value Added Services

Many of the capabilities above are covered in detail this blog. Just type any of the above in the search box.