SAP S/4HANA Stock Room Management in a nutshell

Purpose: Introduction to SAP Stock Room Management solution for warehousing.

Stock Room Management

Before jumping into Stock room management, let’s investigate SAP Note 2577428, which specifies that LE-WM is in a compatibility mode and must not be used beyond 2025 in SAP S/4HANA. Henceforward after the period of 2025 customers would have to pick either SAP Extended warehouse management or Stock room management solution.

What is Stock room management?

Stock room management technically is a new name of LE-WM for S/4HANA without the ability to support complex warehouses. So fundamentally Stock Room Management is a solution in S/4HANA for supporting small & manual warehouses where there is a need for simple & flexible offering covering core warehouse processes.

The idea behind the introduction of the SAP Stock Room Management solution is to give existing LE-WM customers an opportunity to keep their warehouse integral while moving from SAP ECC to S4/HANA. Stock Room Management offers instantaneous the benefit of permitting the business to continue using basic and core warehouse functionality with reducing risk when transforming to S4/HANA.

What is the difference between Stock room management & LE-WM?

There is a considerable reduction of scope & functionalities in the Stock Room Management.

Below is the list of functionalities that are available in LE-WM but not present in Stock Room Management according to SAP Note 2270211.

• Task and resource management (WM-TRM)
• Warehouse control unit interface (WM-LSR)
• Value-added services (WM-VAS)
• Yard management (WM-YM)
• Cross-docking (WM-CD)
• Wave management (WM-TFM-CP)
• Decentral WM (WM-DWM)

So now a question arises, as a customer do I really need to switch to stock room management or basic Extended Warehouse Management?

Existing warehouse management installation cannot be used beyond December 2025 as stated before and here the recommendation from SAP is to migrate to Extended Warehouse Management solution. But If the customer does not have any business drivers or case to move to Extended Warehouse Management, for example, if the business processes are not complex enough and if the customers want to rely on an existing simple, reliable and flexible solution covering core warehouses processes, then they can continue using WM-LE till 2025 and Stock Room Management after that, keeping in mind the exclusion of previously mentioned functionalities after migration to the new solution of Stock Room Management in S4/HANA.

Also, it is worthwhile to consider, although Stock Room Management will be available beyond 2025, customers considering this as a potential option needs to be aware that SAP does not plan on any future development to this product. This means that Fiori Apps or any of the other upgrade benefits that come with ensuing the SAP supply chain roadmap will not be available. If these are essential then opting for Extended Warehouse Management would be the track to choose, as this remains SAP’s strategic roadmap – SAP Note 2881166.

Reference(s)

• SAP Note 2577428 – Road map for LE-WM in SAP S/4HANA
• SAP Note 2270211- S4TWL – Warehouse Management (WM)
• SAP Note 2881166 – FAQ  Stock Room Management
• SAP blog post “S/4HANA Stock Room Management” by “Marco Wahler”.