Multi Customer Warehousing - ERP Integration

[thomaswoite]

Hi all,

allready tried to search the archives but none of the threads found there gave an answer to my particular case.

As a logistic service provider we do have the need, to keep track which stock belongs to wich of our customers. We do not have our own material, but manage the material for our clients. So we have to store the stock and pick it in regard to a client of us.

I understood, that EWM has the capability on being used für multi customer warehousing, but I not sure if i got the rest right.

My current understanding is, that SAP expect us to have our different customers as different plants in erp an this will lead to different parties entitled to dispose in ewm. Is this correct?
My problem with this is: we are already have a pretty stuffed erp system which was based on erp and legacy wm only. we used the plants to give us a physical indication which of our multiple sites is affected by a sales order. each of this sited could than have up to 70(!) clients on its own.

Is there any way around completely messing up our current erp system? in particular I was looking for a possibility to have a BAdI which enables me to make a BP mapping during delivery creation according to my own ruleset?

The owner in my understanding only applies for consignment stock, right? Or would this be a feasible way?

Best, Thomas

[schulte-bahrenberg · Accepted solution]

Hi Thomas,

just a short feedback from my side. I am also working for a 3PL and we have the same challenge. We decided to use one plant (respectively entitled) for each customer. In addition we have implemented some enhancements in order to add prefixes to the materials (in case multiple different customers using the same material number).

We also have warehouses with 30+ customers and I agree the plant means customizing overhead. Still this is one time setup and we think the effort of setting up new plant/customer is not too big (we use some dummies for temporary small customers).

We also thought about using the owner to separate (so have one shared plant and work with consignment stock only) but this way you loose some standard features which were essential for us (e.g. real consignment scenarios or the original vendor object in ERP which could only be used for the warehouse customer then and not for the 'real' vendor of the products).

Would be interesting to know how you finally solve it on your end 😉

regards,

Hendrik

[thomaswoite · Accepted solution]

Hi Hendrik,

thanks for the response. Funny thing is, additions to the material master is our current approach to map the 3pl scenario in the erp environment only. My only hope was, that with using EWM we get rid of this enhancements and come closer to the sap standard. But as you and Katrin pointed out, this is really a limitation in the standard ERP<->EWM integration.

I wonder how this will change when moving EWM 9.4 on s/4 where there should be a common business partner concrete for all module including the erp parts.

But for the time being, i guess we will have to go down the same road, creating multiple plants, one per customer, to map our requirements. If this should change at any point in the future or we find the one make -everything-standard-badi I let you know 🙂

Rgrds, Thomas

[katrin_kraemer]

Hello Thomas,

I am afraid I did not fully understand how you manage your organizations (including the customers for which you store the stock) as of now. Also I do not know to which extend you are executing the processes for your customers. But let me make one suggestion, maybe it fits:

You could have your customers using their ERP and integrate to your EWM system. You would have to make sure that their materials and business partners do not have an overlap, but there is Business Partner ID Mapping and BAdIs in the CIF also for the product to manage that. To invoice your customers you could use Warehouse Billing. Their invoices to their customers is runnign via their own ERP system. We use such concepts to run tests of several ERP versions against one EWM system and it works fine.

A variation of this would be to use a separate ERP system/ client on your side for your customers only, in addition to your existing ERP system.

Regards,
Katrin

[thomaswoite]

Hi Katrin, thanks for the response.

Just to clarify the business scenario we are working in:

We, as a 3PL, LSP habe our own sites and warehouse but do not have own products. We store and transport stock for our customers on our premises and offer additional value added services (like repacking, drumming ...) or maintenance services for their equipment like containers if needed .

This leads to scenarios where our billing would originate in the warehouse (for the warehouse services), in the pp module (for production like steps like drumming) in eam (for maintenance services)...
So we have multiple possible sources coming from erp or scm based systems on how to charge our customers. one customer could even have items from all areas mentioned above on one invoice. Up unitl now, this was implemented with additional developments in legacy wm. For we are now starting to switch to ewm, I was wondering how far the multi client capability in ewm really goes.

You answer seem to confirm my current assumption, that there has to be a multi erp setup (so our ewm, multiple erps from customers side) in order to trigger the multiple entitled to dispose parties. Our key problem is, we need our central erp to consolidate all the various billing activities and most of the the time our clients don't have an erp or are unwilling (from a cost point of view) to have efforts for establishing edi connections to us.

Hope that clears the screnario 🙂

Rgds,

Thomas