Introduction

I would like to throw light on one of the seldom used functionalities rendered by SAP ERP in the area of packing in outbound deliveries. This functionality is namely ‘Control of Automatic PICK HU creation’. It can be utilized in cases where automatic packing is required at the time of picking of warehouse managed materials for a specific combination of source and destination storage types.

Business case

Your customer has warehouse management active for his plant and storage location. He wants to implement the automatic packing functionality for materials being picked for delivery from a specific source storage type for a concerned movement type using a predefined packaging material.

Solution approach

The prerequisites for this functionality are as follows-

1. Define Packaging material type – VHAR

We could either use the standard packaging material types provided by SAP or create a custom one as per the customer’s requirement. For creating a custom packaging material always prefer to copy the standard one and make the necessary changes.

    2.  Define material master for Packaging material – MM01

  The item category group for the packaging material should be ‘VERP’ and relevant data should be maintained in the ‘Packaging material data’ section.

Configuration path to activate automatic Pick HU creation as per our requirement-

IMG -> Logistics General -> Handling Unit Management -> Basics -> Warehouse Management -> Define Control for automatic creation of Pick HUs

As we can see, we can maintain a combination of warehouse number, source storage type, destination storage type, movement type and packaging material. If we do not maintain the packaging material then the system tries to look for a common packaging material for all the line items of the transfer order that is being created for picking the material. This can have negative effect on system’s performance.

There are below three options available to be maintained in the Automatic pick-HU creation field. Select the value as ‘1’ for automatic creation and assignment of a Pick HU to the transfer order line item. However, the limitation with this option is that only one handling unit is created for each transfer order.

To overcome the limitation with above option we use the ‘User exit’ option. When we activate the User exit checkbox a BAdI ‘BADI_HU_AUTOPACK’ is called during the transfer order processing. With the custom ABAP code in this BAdI one can assign several Pick Hus to the transfer order line items as per the requirement.

The other available options for assigning Pick HUs to a transfer order are –

• Manual assignment using transaction code LH01
• Manual assignment on the initial screen of transfer order confirmation – LT12
• By Using IDOC WMPHID01

Kindly leave your valuable comments and feedback.