SAP Extended Warehouse Management

10 keys to success for your migration to EWM (Part 2/2)

In the first part of the 10 keys to success for your migration to EWM , we have already mentioned essential criteria you should keep in mind while setting up your SAP EWM project.

The second part will cover the correct execution of your SAP EWM implementation. We will look into common problems that occur during the project lifecycle as well as migration tools and migration strategies for the EWM migration. While we mostly refer to a migration to EWM from SAP WM or SAP Stock Room Management, you can also apply the mentioned migration tools and approaches to your third-party warehouse management system.
» 10 keys to success for your migration to EWM (Part 1)

6. Consider dependencies to other SAP modules

As already highlighted in the first part, the implementation of a new warehouse management system is no mere technical migration. This applies, too, if you are already using an SAP warehouse management system.

Therefore, one should keep their focus on the integration of SAP EWM with S/4HANA core or ECC/ERP in SAP Business Suite, respectively. This is particularly true for the modules SD, MM, but also PP. An example for this is the best-practice approach in EWM to use one storage location for goods receipt (Received-on-dock, ROD storage location) and one storage location for stock that has already been put away (Available-for-sale, AFS storage location). This often implies a change of the storage location structure in SAP MM which has to be considered in material planning and storage location determination in SAP SD.

7. Include the physical process in your thinking

A distinctive feature of warehouse management systems is that they are designed to support physical processes. Therefore, it is imperative to consider the physical process flow during the implementation of SAP EWM. A highly elegant process will be of no use in daily business if it does not match the physical and ergonomical situation. Such an EWM implementation may lead to low system acceptance by key-users and end-users and the elaborately designed processes are not put to use in practice. To ensure user acceptance and reach process goals, the persons affected should be included in the process design workshops.

8. Don't forget about (re-)education

Even people who have already been working in classic SAP Warehouse Management will find that their knowledge from SAP WM can not be applied directly to SAP EWM. As some of the underlying concepts differ, technical terms and processes have to be learned from scratch. Transport orders from SAP WM are then called warehouse tasks, storage units become handling units and many more naming subtleties await. The afore-mentioned term pairs cannot be translated 1:1 from WM to EWM, but are also slightly different semantically. Thus, appropriate training planning and the creation of comprehensive education material is required.

All of the above points concerning training planning and training execution should be considered during the transition to SAP EWM.

9. Define migration strategy and migration objects

When migrating to SAP EWM, a rough plan should be created at an early stage including migration, cut-over and go-live of the new warehouse management system. An example flow for the creation of such a migration plan:

  1. Define migration objects to be migrated to EWM
  2. Specify the migration method per migration object for the migration to SAP EWM
  3. Identify dependencies between the migration objects (e.g. stock can be migrated only after storage bins were created and material master data was transferred)
  4. Estimate required effort / migration duration for each migration object
  5. Create time schedule for technical migration under consideration of dependencies and migration durations for each migration object

Ideally, you have the opportunity to practice the migration in a sandbox system in order to test the migration plan. By doing so,

  • you practice the migration process to ensure a smooth migration for the go-live,
  • you gain new insights about dependencies and actual migration durations and
  • you can update your migration plan with the new knowledge.

The following table lists some ideas for possible migration objects in your migration to SAP EWM:

Migrationsobjekt Methode für Datenmigration Abhängigkeiten
Storage bins
  • Upload from Excel
  • manual creation
  • manual mass creation
Storage bin sorting
  • Upload from Excel
  • manual sorting according to customizing
  • Storage bins
Product (material master data)
  • Transfer from ERP / S/4HANA
Batch and batch valuation
  • Transfer from ERP / S/4HANA
  • Product (material master data)
Warehouse product (EWM data)
  • Transfer from ERP / S/4HANA
  • Upload from Excel
  • manual creation
  • manual mass creation
  • Product (material master data)
Packing data (packaging specification)
  • Transfer from ERP / S/4HANA
  • Upload from Excel
  • manual creation
  • manual mass creation
  • Product (material master data)
  • Warehouse product (EWM data)
Fixed bin assignments
  • Upload from Excel
  • manual creation
  • Storage bins
  • Product (material master data)
  • Warehouse product (EWM data)
Replenishment data
  • Upload from Excel
  • manual creation
  • Product (material master data)
  • Warehouse product (EWM data)
Stock data
  • Upload from Excel
  • manual postings
  • LSMW
  • Storage bins
  • Product (material master data)
  • Batch and batch valuation
  • Warehouse product (EWM data)
Business partners (customers, suppliers, carriers)
  • Transfer from ERP / S/4HANA
  • manual creation

10. Execution of migration to SAP EWM

What exactly does it mean now for your migration to SAP EWM if you plan to do the migration via upload from Excel? Depending on the migration object, it is necessary to download the data from the legacy system first, convert it into a suitable structure for EWM via Excel and upload it to SAP EWM in CSV format.

To finish this article, we will take a look at some of the tools for the migration from SAP WM to SAP EWM as provided by SAP.

Migration of product data with /SCWM/MIG_PRODUCT

With the EWM transaction /SCWM/MIG_PRODUCT, you can ...

  • download warehouse product data from WM and upload it to EWM. You can define suitable conversion rules in the customizing. The upload to EWM is a separate process step. Of course you can prepare the data completely in Excel and use only the upload functionality.
  • download fixed bin assignments from WM and upload in EWM.
  • download palletization data (packaging specifications) from WM (material master view: warehouse management 2) and upload in EWM.

Migration of storage bin data: /SCWM/MIG_BIN, /SCWM/SBUP and others

With the EWM transaction /SCWM/MIG_BIN, you can ...

  • download storage bins from SAP WM and upload in EWM.
  • download storage bin sorting from SAP WM and upload in EWM.

An alternative to this is the manual data preparation and upload via transactions /SCWM/SBUP (Upload of storage bins) and /SCWM/SRTUP (Upload of storage bin sorting) or sorting via /SCWM/SBST.

Migration of stock data

Firstly, you can transfer stock data to EWM via transaction /SCWM/MIG_STOCK (download from SAP WM and upload in EWM). In this case however, the storage location that was used before should remain the same and only the warehouse management be exchanged. In many real-life migrations, this is not a suitable approach. Therefore, the transaction /SCWM/ISU (initial stock upload) is often used instead during migration.

While evaluating and defining the migrations tools for the stock migration, it is important to consider the postings in SAP MM that will result from the stock migration. The best-suited approach should be defined in the migration concept.

We have developed tools for the conversion of stock data from legacy systems to the upload structure for SAP EWM. These were successfully put to use in our EWM projects and we are looking forward to demonstrating them to you.

Bottom line

In this post (click here for the first part), we have laid out important keys to success for your migration to SAP EWM from SAP WM or a non-SAP warehouse management system.

We hope that you liked this post and that we could provide some answers for your EWM project. If you have further questions, feel free to contact us via the contact form below.

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