Benefits of Integration: Embedded SAP TM and EWM in S/4HANA
Business Benefits of Direct Integration Between Embedded SAP Transportation Management and SAP Extended Warehouse Management in SAP S/4HANA
Today’s supply chain is complex and the improvement in the efficiency of a supply chain is one of the major aims for most customers. SAP TM helps in the reduction of freight costs with optimisation of resource (e.g. truck) capacity and SAP EWM assists in the improvement of warehouse efficiencies. SAP also offers Direct integration between SAP TM and SAP EWM. This blog will explain one of the business benefits of Direct integration between embedded TM and EWM in the S/4HANA 1909 release.
Capacity utilisation of a truck depends very much on how the products have been packaged. Package building (PB) functionality of Transportation management (TM ) provides the option to build pallets with the most appropriate packing box or packaging material to optimise the capacity of the truck. And now the Direct integration between TM & EWM can now transfer the packaging material (considered in TM package building) to EWM so that the warehouse manager arranges to also pack the deliveries or materials with the same packaging material.
A typical process flow diagram for direct integration between TM and EWM with S/4HANA is shown in the below image for Delivery based transportation planning. Outbound delivery from S/4HANA core gets distributed/transferred and automatically creates Freight unit (FU) and outbound delivery order (ODO) in embedded TM and EWM respectively. A freight order (FO) is created after transportation planning. A freight order can be correlated to a truck. ‘Package building’ functionality of TM creates packages (or pallets) for the relevant deliveries in freight order with the relevant packaging material as set in TM master data – and as shown in section (1) of the below image. Once the ‘Load plan’ is finalised for the truck, the freight order is transferred from TM to EWM which creates a Transportation unit in EWM. Package from TM creates a Planned shipping handling unit (PSHU) in EWM.
Now, let us look into the SAP transaction objects for the flow depicted in the above diagram. An outbound delivery 80001263 in S/4HANA core created a freight unit 410002789 in TM, and a freight order 6100001058 has been created from that freight unit. ‘Package building’ on the freight order 6100001058 created a package(pallet) with packaging material PB_PAL_01 as shown in section (1) in the below image, which is also shown as packaging material in section (2) in Planned shipping handling unit (PSHU) of outbound delivery order for EWM in below image.
The Transportation planning in TM and warehouse operations in EWM are generally carried out by different teams in industry and this automatic transfer of packaging material from TM to EWM will reduce manual work, human error and the extent of co-ordination between Transport planner & warehouse manager.
The scenario in this blog considers a single delivery just for the sake of simplicity. The functionality explained in this blog can be used for real life examples with multiple deliveries/freight units in a freight order with multiple packaging materials.
The scenario and screenshots are from a S/4HANA 1909 environment with embedded TM and EWM. Additional scenarios on TM -EWM integration are expected in future/upcoming releases of S/4HANA. The scenario described here is also applicable for decentralised EWM and TM.
Author: Mrinal Roy, SAP S/4HANA & Supply Chain Solutions Architect and author of SAP Press books on S/4HANA
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