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Welcome to our blog post for the SAP EWM Podcast Episode 11 – Stay Future Ready with SAP EWM - Flexibility and Modularity
You can listen to the podcast episode in English and in German on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts or Sway! Enjoy!
SAP EWM is a standard software for warehouse management and intralogistics which combines the advantages of a standard solution with the possibilities of a tool box - from the beginning flexibility, modularity and extensibility of the solution were the cornerstones of the architecture!
And being a standard solution as well as a tool box is crucial for a Warehouse Management System because every warehouse is somehow unique. In addition, intralogistics is constantly changing because it always has to adapt to the requirements of its internal and external customers. And successful companies gain competitive advantages in the market by continuously optimizing their logistics.
A future-proof WMS must be able to support this constant change. Just as SAP EWM can do.
SAP EWM is a standard solution!
First of all, it is important to understand that SAP EWM is a standard solution in which all available standard processes can be used via configuration. This means that the warehouse structure, multi-step processes, putaway and stock removal strategies, id point processing on conveyor systems, mobile dialogs and much more can be used out-of-the-box. And EWM can be implemented and adapted in a very flexible way to the company-specific requirements even via configuration and without a single line of coding. At SAP we call that customizing and master data. The following pictures should give an impression about the capabilities of SAP EWM. Link to official SAP EWM product landing page on sap.com.
What is SAP EWM Customizing?
The term customizing is often used by other WMS providers to describe adjustments of the WMS codeline. At SAP, however, customizing describes settings that can be made by the customer or implementation partner and then transported to the test and production systems. These customizing settings are warehouse number specific, so that different warehouses in one system can be configured completely different and independent from each other.
Let’s make an example… You define a storage types in SAP EWM Customizing: How should the storage bin be found during putaway, do you want to manage handling units there - yes or no - and how should the stock behave when you mix different best before dates - is it allowed or not, do want to use the oldest one when you merge the stock? All these behaviours can be defined in SAP EWM with customizing and master data.
SAP EWM provides an extremely large number of options to customize the system and, of course, best practice processes are available for all core processes in the warehouse. And most important... All possible standard processes, best practices and function-specific configuration options are well documented and the documentation is accessible for everybody.
For simple warehouses, these configuration options are often perfectly sufficient. The SAP EWM Podcast Episode 12 covers this topic and explains why SAP EWM is also the best solution for simple warehouses.
Technical Frameworks in SAP EWM - hidden Champions!
When we talk about the flexibility and extensibility of SAP EWM technical frameworks in EWM are extremely important for the flexibility of the solution. SAP EWM uses these frameworks to provide standard functions itself and to enable customer-specific extensions of standard features.
There is for example the RF framework – RF stands for Radio Frequency. It is the foundation of the mobile working environment in EWM. The RF Framework provides mobile transactions for almost all processes in the warehouse which can be used out of the box in the EWM standard. These transactions can be customized and extended via the framework. And Customers can even build completely own mobile transaction on their own. In addition it is used to control the verification, to provide the right features to the right people and customers can have their own graphical mobile designs using SAP Screen Personas.
The warehouse management monitor is also both a standard function and a toolbox. Both the reports for data selection (also called nodes) and the context-specific functions to control the processes (also called methods) can be adapted and expanded as desired.
The same applies to the integrated material flow System, EWM MFS. Extensive functions for telegram processing, for communication with PLCs and so on are available, but can also be extended very easily in the project. To make just one example. SAP EWM offers an ID-point processing with many standard checks and the creation of the putaway storage tasks. This can be extended via BAdIs or even used as a template for your own ID-point processing if required. Via configuration the own ID-point logic can be easily coupled with the telegram processing.
The Post Processing Framework is another central tool in EWM that is used in many functions. It is a little bit comparable to the message control in SAP ERP and it allows to trigger any kind of follow-up actions for the different objects in EWM. And there are many standard PPF actions that can be activated. For example the automatic printing for deliveries, warehouse orders, physical inventory documents or packages – so called Handling Units. The automatic wave determination also runs via the PPF framework as well as automatic goods receipt postings or the automatic warehouse task creation for inbound deliveries. Customers can also easily create their own PPF actions and can implement any follow-up actions for the available EWM objects.
The condition technique is used to decide whether and how an action should be executed. This is another flexible tool to determine, based on rules, for example if a document should be printed and on which printer, or to determine the right wave template for an outbound delivery item, or to find the right packaging specification for a customer order.
And, of course, the forms to be printed can be customized very easily too. It doesn’t matter if Smartforms or the newer Adobe Forms are used. Graphical tools such as Adobe LiveCycle Designer support the creation of customer-specific forms based on delivered templates in EWM. And this is even in paperless warehouses a very important function!
SAP EWM also re-uses the KPI framework of SAP S/4HANA. Therefore SAP EWM provides a lot Core Data Services with predefined KPIs which can easily be used to define own KPI Tiles in the system or which can also be re-used in the SAP Analytics Cloud for example for intuitive dashboards for operational reporting on live data of the productive EWM systems.
In-App Extensibility with SAP EWM
But of course there are also requirements for which the many configuration options may not be sufficient. For example, a customer wants to influence the stock removal strategy very individually, which may require a few lines of coding. Or customers wants to store some additional information for EWM standard objects. Or customers want to adjust the look and feel of SAP EWM or... or... or...
There are many use cases and reasons, why customers want to adopt or extend SAP EWM. And SAP EWM is made to support this - in a way that customers keep the upgrade secure of their EWM system!
SAP EWM data model extensions
Customers are of course able to extend the data model of SAP EWM - either with No-Code or Pro-Code tools.
For example the extension of the material master with customer-specific fields or the extension of outbound deliveries, sometimes in combination with the transfer of the required fields from ERP documents which also can require an extension of the standard SAP ERP to SAP EWM interface.
All EWM objects have predefined extension structures. Fields are automatically displayed in apps like the warehouse management monitor or similar. And interface extensions are also possible via predefined extension structures and BAdI implementations.
And that leads us to a very important capability of SAP EWM - the availability of hundreds of Business Add-Ins so called BAdIs.
What is a BAdI and why is it so powerful?
Basically, a BAdI is predefined enhancement spot of the SAP standard software via which customers are enabled to influence the process or behavior of the software for example to influence the stock removal strategy. And best of all, these enhancements are absolutely upgrade secure. This means that after a release upgrade, these extensions will not only remain in the system, but will do exactly the same just as they did before the upgrade.
SAP EWM provides hundreds of these BAdIs. Well documented and often delivered with example implementations. That’s why consultants often call this extensibility approach the "extended EWM standard"!
And from my own experience, I would say this tool is the most important one when it comes to implementing customer-specific requirements in the system that go beyond the extensive configuration options of EWM.
BAdIs also play an important role when we talk about a template and roll-out approach for SAP EWM and if we have multiple warehouses in the same SAP System which share some extension and which also need for some processes warehouse specific extensions. Therefore BAdIs can have multiple implementations and you can activate them by filter values. That enables our customers to re-use extensions or multiple warehouses and to differentiate warehouses if necessary - in one SAP EWM system of course!
User Interface personalization with SAP EWM
As a mature and grown solution SAP EWM provides different UI technologies like SAP Fiori, Web-GUI and ITS Mobile for the mobile working environment RF Framework. For all these different technologies SAP EWM provides No-Code/Low-Code tools to adapt the UIs.
Fiori Apps can be adapted with the built-in Fiori tools for UI Adaption.
Web-GUI apps like the SAP EWM Warehouse Monitor can be personalized with SAP Screen Personas which allows to remove screen elements, to highlight screen elements or to rename EWM standard terms.
SAP Screen Personas is also used for the personalization of the SAP EWM mobile working environment RF Frameworks which uses ITS Mobile to publish the screens on mobile devices. With the low-code capabilities of SAP Screen Personas SAP EWM customers can make the screens not only more intuitive but they can also automate flows in the RF Framework and you can for example use pictures to further improve the user experience.
Classical In-App extensibility
With SAP EWM running in private cloud deployment customers are of course still able to use the classical extensibility options like defining own data elements, structures or tables. And it is still possible to develop own reports, UIs or other technical objects within an SAP EWM system using the ABAP capabilities. However these kind of extensions are more and more shifted outside of the system known as Side-by-Side extensibility.
Side-by-Side Extensibility with SAP EWM
With the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) customers can easily combine the core functions of EWM with innovative technologies from tour technology platform. SAP BTP offers for example no-code and pro-code tools to develop native apps or fiori apps but also tools like intelligent Robot Process Automation (iRPA) to automate processes in the system. In addition SAP BTP offers technologies like AI services which can leverage huge benefits also for warehouse logistics.
For this reason SAP EWM provides many public APIs which can be used to extend the solution side-by-side with the capabilities of the SAP Business Technology Platform.
Pre-built Add-Ons for SAP EWM - Don't reinvent the wheel... just check the SAP Store!
Due to the long market presence and the wide and global distribution of SAP EWM there is even a market for SAP EWM extensions. The extensions are called Add-Ons, Consulting Solutions, Best Practises etc.. All of them have common idea. If there is a feature which is not covered by SAP EWM in standard it is very likely that there SAP partners who have implemented this feature already at one or many customers. And many of these partners develop based on this experience predefined extensions or complete services which can be used by SAP EWM customers to accelerate implementations or to close a gap which is not covered by SAP EWM in standard.
Many of these pre-build extensions can be found in the SAP Store. Just search for extensions for SAP EWM!
In the SAP Store there are extensions for SAP EWM which for example help to integrate an Autostore System, which enable the management of AMR fleets or which provides native apps for EWM based on public APIs.
Conclusion
SAP EWM is standard warehouse management solution for all types of warehouses of a company. It doesn't matter if it is component warehouse in production, an intermediate warehouse for semi-finished or finished goods or a regional or global distribution center. It covers all sizes and complexities of warehouses and supports intralogistics processes in all industries. It's both an "out-of-the Box" WMS solution and also a powerful toolbox.
Helpful Links:
SAP Onboarding Resource Center - Many helpful assets for a successful SAP EWM implementation
SAP Business Accelerator Hub - Explore SAP EWM public APIs
SAP Store - Explore pre-built SAP Add-Ons
SAP Discovery Center - Explore SAP BTP Services and Missions
SAP BAdI - Detailed Explanation
SAP Learning Hub - Build and maintain your SAP EWM skills with predefined Learning Journeys
Please visit our SAP EWM Podcast Landing Page with all Episodes, Blog Posts and Podcast Notes
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