Integration of EWM with 3PL System

[Former Member]

Hi SAP EWM Gurus,

I am a business user so please excuse my ignorance about EWM. My company is implementing SAP globally and we have a dilemma whether to use IM or EWM.

While our parent company owns and operate warehouses in other countries, we do not own and operate any warehouse in Australia. Everything is outsourced to 3PLs who have their own WMS ( multiple 3PLs with a variety of systems). We also have a small warehouse in our manufacturing facility ( 600 Bins/Slots) .

The dilemma we have is that we do not want to get all bells and whistles EWM when we only need to manage 600 bins. Inventory turnover rate is very high in this small warehouse as it is mainly used for staging packaging and raw material for manufacturing and finished goods are staged for less than 24 hours, before being sent off to a 3PL.

All other warehouse related activities are managed at the 3PL- receipt from production , putaway, picking, loading.

IM would suit us for all other operations except for the on site storage with 600 bins, I would like to know if it is possible to have EWM activated for  Bin/Slot level management of inventory in one plant and behave like IM for rest of it or is it all or nothing at all scenario?

What other options could be explored?

Your thoughts will be highly appreciated.

[Sandip_S · Accepted solution]

"I would like to know if it is possible to have EWM activated for  Bin/Slot level management of inventory in one plant and behave like IM for rest of it or is it all or nothing at all scenario?

What other options could be explored?"

Like WM, EWM can be activated for specific storage locations in the plant. For e.g. If your plant is having A, B & C storage locations then you can activate EWM for SLOC A and for B & C you can use IM if required.

However for EWM, based on licence you bought you can use it as a add-on with SAP ECC or different server. If you are using APO in SCM then it is always recommended to have separate server for EWM. Then end users needs to login into two different system one is in ECC and another in EWM which initially they dont like . Once the users are comfortable then they start liking the system.

As correctly explained by David, if you are implementing new SAP system then you should go ahead with EWM with advance production integration which you can use for staging of packaging and raw materials. For finished goods you can use cross-dock option integrated with 3-PL systems.

Thanks,

Sandip

[worldwidewebbd]

Hello Ben,

As you will have SAP sometime soon, you could also look to use the WM component inside SAP ERP. This would extend your plant and storage location structures (IM) to have some warehouse functionality. This option does not attract a license fee which is helpful, allows the use of storage bin management and with pick and putaway strategies, as well as some RF processing, but is not nearly as powerful as EWM though, but it may be an option for a small warehouse operation.

One thing to bear in mind is the support for WM is also going to be limited somewhere in the future, date to be determined, as the strategy from SAP is to get EWM to replace WM in the future, as mentioned, date yet to be determined.

Any further info you may need, ping me a note.

Best regards, David

[Former Member]

Hi David,

Thanks for your prompt response. It seems that the program is a bit averse to use WM for the reasons cited by you.

It certainly does seems like the go between solution but then if get's unsupported we would have issues in future.

It's never easy to get the solution that fits with 100% congruence to needs !

Cheers,

Ben

[Former Member]

Hi David,

Would it be safe to assume that SAP has fixed all known bugs in WM.. for most practical use cases? What happens to those who bought ERP like 3 years ago? Will they get EWM license for free? Is there an official announcement from SAP on WM development discontinuation? 

I too need to prepare an advisory based on such announcements. For similar circumstances. We are also evaluating a non-SAP WM product viz. Manhattan Associates that users seem to much like in a particular country where WM was replaced some years ago.

Thanks

L