Dock appointment scheduling (DAS) in Embedded Extended warehouse management (EWM) integrated with embedded Transportation management (TM ) in S/4HANA

The USP (Unique selling proposition) of SAP is its capability of integration. In SAP R/3 or ECC, it used to be the integration between modules like Materials management (MM) with Finance (FI) etc. If some goods are receipted and posted with a transaction called MIGO, then it not only updates the inventory, but also does financial posting simultaneously.

Now with SAP S/4HANA, the scope of integration in SAP has gone beyond modules. Several applications have been merged (embedded) within S/4HANA resulting in substantial simplifications in business processes and significant Business & IT benefits. My present blog is to describe one of the several simplifications with cross application integration in SAP S/4HANA.

The below image shows a typical process flow diagram for Dock appointment scheduling (DAS) in embedded Extended warehouse management (EWM) with embedded Transportation management ( TM ) in S/4HANA for an Outbound transportation.

Freight unit (FU) and Outbound delivery order (ODO) get created in embedded TM and embedded EWM respectively, after the outbound delivery is created (and distributed) in S/4HANA. Refer my blogpost https://blogs.sap.com/2018/03/14/direct-integration-between-embedded-ewm-tm-in-s4hana-improving-overall-efficiency-of-suply-chain/ for the benefits of Direct integration between embedded TM and embedded EWM in S/4HANA. Will focus on Dock appointment scheduling (DAS) in this blog to explain how SAP’s DAS helps to plan and schedule the arrival of vehicles in the warehouse or distribution centre.

Transportation planner plans the transportation and creates a freight order (FO) in TM. Freight order is (often) correlated to a truck. When the freight order is transferred from TM to EWM, a ‘Transportation unit’ (TU) is created in embedded EWM along with an ‘Appointment’ in Dock appointment scheduling (DAS) as shown in below images.

Note (in above images) that standard SAP also ensures that the number of Transportation (TU) unit in EWM is same as of freight order in TM and the Appointment number in DAS is same as of TU internal number of EWM for better identification for corresponding objects by the Transportation planner and Warehouse manager. The appointment number created automatically in DAS also gets updated in TU in embedded EWM as shown in below image.

When a time slot is assigned to the ‘Appointment’ , then its status gets changed to ‘Planned’ from ‘Provisional’ and the date with start & end time of docking at warehouse door get updated in TU from DAS in EWM as shown in below image.

 This integration of DAS of EWM with TM in S/4HANA eliminates the time consuming & error prone manual works and helps the warehouse manager with

• visibility of warehouse load on a particular day
• information on deliveries that need to be picked and made ready on a day
• plan to reduce the waiting time of truck
• increased warehouse efficiency

This blog is based on my personal  tests /observations. Will appreciate your feedback / comments.