Integration of Plant Maintenance(PM) with Extended warehouse management (EWM) in S/4HANA 2021 Release

SAP scores over other ERPs’ on its integration capabilities between its modules / Business processes and applications. SAP’s default warehouse management solution EWM (Extended warehouse management) has strong integration with business processes like Order to cash (O2C), Procure to Pay (P2P) , Production and Transportation. However, EWM was lacking in its capability to integrate with Maintenance processes till its S/4HANA 2020 release. This limitation of integration of Plant Maintenance (PM) order with EWM has been eliminated in S/4HANA 2021 release. My present blog is to discuss on this integration of EWM with PM.

SAP’s EWM Product Owner Joerg Michaelis has illustrated the new EWM functionalities of S/4HANA 2021 release in his blog https://blogs.sap.com/2021/10/14/sap-extended-warehouse-management-in-sap-s-4hana-2021-whats-new/.

A typical process flow diagram for EWM – PM integration with delivery is depicted in below image.

1 ) A Maintenance order (4000022) is created for a component FG12 as shown in the below image. It also captures the EWM issuing plant (1010), storage location (EAFS), maintenance personnel or Goods recipient (Mrinal) and Recipient location (RL01). A reservation for the component can be created automatically.

2 ) An outbound delivery (80002589) is created corresponding to the reservation of the Maintenance order 4000022 as shown in below image with Pick list MB26 or Goods issue (MIGO). This delivery from ERP is distributed to EWM.

3 ) An EWM Outbound delivery order is created as shown in below image. Maintenance order , reservation, Recipient , Recipient location etc from Maintenance order are mapped to the EWM outbound delivery order.

Picking, packing etc are carried out as per the warehouse processes. EWM ‘s multi step picking operations like POSC (Process oriented storage control) can also be carried out as per the business requirements or standard EWM processes.

SAP has also provided search parameters like Plant Maintenance order , reservation in EWM warehouse monitor to find out the outbound delivery order as in below image.

4 ) Outbound delivery gets created in EWM on Goods issue on EWM outbound delivery order . Post processing framework (PPF) from EWM Outbound delivery updates the ERP outbound delivery with Handling unit and Goods issue as shown in below image.

5 ) A material document gets created on Post goods issue (PGI) on ERP outbound delivery and it captures maintenance order , outbound delivery, reservation etc as shown in below image.

Above flow has been illustrated with embedded EWM, however this EWM – PM integration has also been released for Decentralized EWM on S/4HANA 2021 Release.

SAP has introduced new code initiator (PMD), document type (OPM) as shown below and item type (ODPM) for this integration with Maintenance order. These document type , item type , respective profiles etc can be configured by activating BC set /SCWM/DLV_OUTBOUND_PM (Outbound Delivery Process for Plant Maintenance Order). Maintenance return can also be modelled by activating BC set /SCWM/DLV_INBOUND_PM (Inbound Delivery for Plant Maintenance Integration) similar to the outbound component as described in this blog.

This EWM – PM integration will benefit several customers specially customers in Oil & gas , Utilities etc to automate and accelerate the staging of components for their maintenance operations.

This blog is based on my personal tests, observations in embedded EWM on S/4HANA 2021 release. Will appreciate your feedback / comments.