How You Can Get Started with SAP Warehouse Operator App

Introduction

SAP Warehouse Operator, the newly released native app for SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM), is now available for Apple iPhones. You can learn more on how to get started with SAP Warehouse Operator in this blog post.

To use SAP Warehouse Operator, there are few pre-requisites:

• You need SAP S/4HANA OP
• You need SAP Business Technology Platform with SAP Mobile Services
• You need SAP Cloud Connector
• You need to use Apple iPhone 11 or higher with Apple iOS 14 or above

The SAP Warehouse Operator app can be downloaded for free from Apple App Store here  or using the QR code below.

SAP Warehouse Operator – QR Code

With this blog post, I will give you a picture of three scenarios on how to get started with SAP Warehouse Operator. You may apply one of these scenarios to your situation.

1. You wish to find out the features provided by the app in a demo mode.
2. You already are using SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and would like to start using SAP Warehouse Operator.
3. You wish guidance on how to setup the needed components to experience the SAP Warehouse Operator.

Scenario 1: Explore app features in the demo mode

You have downloaded the app from the Apple App Store. Provided with the app, you can access the demo mode and immediately experience the features of the app. Simply choose the option “Try the Demo” when opening SAP Warehouse Operator on your device.

SAP Warehouse Operator

SAP Warehouse Operator – Demo Mode Screens

Scenario 2: You already have SAP S/4HANA 2021, are using SAP Business Technology Platform with SAP Mobile Services and would like to start using SAP Warehouse Operator

If you already are running SAP EWM on SAP S/4HANA OP 2021 with SAP Cloud Connector in your system environment and are using SAP Business Technology Platform with SAP Mobile Services, most of these building blocks are in place and ready to accommodate SAP Warehouse Operator.

SAP Warehouse Operator – Building Blocks

As the content provider for SAP Warehouse Operator, SAP S/4HANA 2021 comes with external APIs, which are used by the SAP Warehouse Operator app. These APIs need to be enabled in your SAP EWM embedded in SAP S/4HANA system or decentralized SAP EWM based on SAP S/4HANA. For details on these APIs and how to enable these in SAP S/4HANA 2021, please refer to SAP note 3093108.

Publishing Service Groups

As follows, the current version of SAP Warehouse Operator utilizes following ODATA V4 APIs for which the corresponding service groups need to be published in your SAP S/4HANA backend system.

• API_WAREHOUSE_RESOURCE_2
• API_WAREHOUSE_2
• API_WAREHOUSE_ORDER_TASK_2

To publish above APIs logon to your SAP S/4HANA OP 2021 backend system and start transaction /IWFND/V4_ADMIN as shown below.

SAP Gateway Service Administration

Open the ‘Service Groups’ folder on the left panel by clicking on the arrow left to the folder ‘Service Groups’ to access the list of available service groups, like Service Group API_WAREHOUSE_2, API_WAREHOUSE_ORDER_TASK_2 and API_WAREHOUSE_RESOURCE_2.

Service Groups

Note: If you do not see these service groups here, you have to use the Publish Service Groups button.

Publish Service Groups

Click on the button ‘Publish Service Groups’, which will open following screen. From here you can trigger the ‘Get Service Group’ function. You will be presented with a list of entries from where you can then select the needed 3 service groups API_WAREHOUSE_2, API_WAREHOUSE_ORDER_TASK_2 and API_WAREHOUSE_RESOURCE_2 from the populated ‘Not Published Service Groups’ list

Get Service Groups

Not Published Service Groups

Once the needed service groups are listed like shown below, select a service group (e.g. API_WAREHOUSE_RESOURCE_2) and publish this by hitting the button ‘Publish Service Group’. Repeat these steps for all remaining service groups mentioned above.

Select Service Group

If you have followed these steps to publish missing service groups, you should now be able to access these in the folder ‘Service Groups’ of the transaction /IWFND/V4_ADMIN.

SAP Warehouse Operator Service Groups

To run a check, if a service group returns and can provide possible data to the SAP Warehouse Operator app, you should execute a service test.  As an example, we will select the service group API_WAREHOUSE_RESOURCE_2 and perform this test by clicking the ‘Service Test’ button.

Service Test

Once you have clicked on ‘Service Test’, you should be presented with the following screen, where you first click on the button ‘Entity Set’, then select ‘WarehouseResource’ from the popup and finally execute the test using the ‘Execute’ button.

SAP Gateway Client – Test Service

If all goes well, you should receive a HTTP Response with status code 200 and some results of your SAP EWM resources maintained in your SAP S/4HANA OP system.

SAP Gateway Client – Test Response

This concludes the publishing and initial testing of Service Groups used for SAP Warehouse Operator.

With the steps noted above, you can now configure mobile destination on SAP Mobile Services, assuming you are already running SAP Business Technology Platform with connectivity setup via SAP Cloud Connector to your SAP S/4HANA OP 2021 system.

A great blog post from Claus Burgaard, will help you installing and configurating the SAP Cloud Connector. It also covers the steps, on how to make a on-premise content provider to the services on SAP Business Technology Platform.

Yet another excellent blog post from Claus Burgaard, will guide you on how to set up principal propagation to allow users who are authenticated by SAP BTP to access SAP S/4HANA OP content. How to do this, is described here.

Creating Mobile Destinations

In above section you have seen that the SAP Warehouse Operator app connects to API endpoint on your SAP S/4HANA OP 2021 system. These need to be configured in SAP Mobile Services as part of SAP Business Technology Platform.

In this section you’ll learn how to configure the mobile destination on SAP Mobile Service for the SAP Warehouse Operator app.

With your SAP Mobile Services up and running logon to your SAP Mobile Services cockpit.

SAP Mobile Services Cockpit

Next, select ‘Native/Hybrid’ from the left panel of the cockpit and create a new entry using the ‘New’ button as shown below.

SAP Mobile Services – New Mobile Application

As follows, you will need to maintain both mandatory fields ‘ID’ and ‘Name’ for basic information.

• ID: com.sap.mobile.apps.warehouseoperator
• Name: SAP Warehouse Operator

Enter for both fields the entries as displayed below. Click ‘Next’.

In a second and final step, you assign features for the native application. Default assigned features  like ‘Mobile Offline Access’ or ‘Mobile Augmented Reality’ not needed for the SAP Warehouse Operator app, have been de-selected  by un-checking the appropriate check-boxes. Select ‘Mobile Connectivity’ from the list, if not yet already marked as checked and click ‘Finish’.

New Application – Assign Features

Once the application ‘SAP Warehouse Operator’ has been created, you can create mobile destinations by clicking on ‘Mobile Connectivity’ from the assigned features list on the left hand side of the screen as shown below.

SAP Warehouse Operator – Mobile Connectivity

Clicking on ‘Mobile Connectivity, will result in a screen ‘Mobile Connectivity’ with no entries for ‘Mobile Destinations’. In the presented screen,  select the ‘Create’ button on the right hand side of the screen has highlighted below.

Mobile Connectivity – Create Mobile Destinations

A guided step-by-step procedure will help you to create the mobile destinations, which point to the mentioned external APIs provided by your SAP S/4HANA OP 2021 system. As an example, we will create a new mobile destination for the SAP S/4HANA OP 2021 service group API_WAREHOUSE_RESOURCE_2.

Providing basic information

• Enter API_WAREHOUSE_RESOURCE_V4 into the field ‘Destination Name’.
• Enter the URL http://<host>:<port>/sap/opu/odata4/sap/api_warehouse_resource_2/srvd_a2x/sap/api_warehouse_resource_2/0001/ which should point to the virtual host of your SAP Cloud Connector. Replace <host> and <port> with your respective host and port name of your SAP Cloud Connector.
• Check the usage of Cloud Connector

Mobile Destination – Basic Info

Note: For information on parameter values for fields like ‘Maximum Connections’ or ‘Timeout (ms)’ please refer to the official help documentation for SAP Mobile Services at this link.

• Maintain custom Headers (optional)
  • If you wish to configure the destination to connect to a specific SAP S/4HANA client, you can create the ‘Header Name’ sap-client and provide a value for the sap-client parameter – the key/value pair(s) will be sent to the backend with each request.

Mobile Destinations – Custom Headers

• Configure annotations (not needed).
• Configure Destination
  • In this final step you general configure which SSO Mechanism is to be used for the mobile destination. Here you select a single-sign-on option from a list of available options. If for example you which to enable principal propagation through SAP Cloud Connector, then choose Cloud Connector SSO from the available options – for the other options detailed information, please refer to this link.

Mobile Destinations – Destination Configuration

To finish the last step, click on ‘Finish’ to finalize the configuration this mobile destinations on SAP Mobile Services. For the configuration of the remaining mobile destinations API_WAREHOUSE_V4, API_WAREHOUSE_ORDER_TASK_V4 and com.sap.mobile.apps.warehouseoperator please refer to the official help documentation for SAP Warehouse Operator – section Configure Mobile Services -> Create Destinations at this link.

Where to find the QR code for app onboarding

Once you have performed all necessary configuration steps for the SAP Warehouse Operator app and need to scan the QR code during the app onboarding step, here is how to find the QR code.

From the cockpit of your SAP Mobile Services click on Mobile Applications -> Native/Hybrid and select SAP Warehouse Operator from the list. The onboarding QR code can be found by clicking on the API tab, as shown below.

SAP Warehouse Operator – Onboarding QR Code

Scenario 3: You wish guidance on how to setup the needed components to experience the SAP Warehouse Operator

An overview of the building blocks to operate the SAP Warehouse Operator app with the general system prerequisites, overall configuration steps and security topics is provided to you under the SAP Help Portal.

Please find the official SAP Help documentation for SAP Warehouse Operator at this link.

Summary

In this blog post you have learned to get started with the SAP Warehouse Operator app for iOS. I hope that the information mentioned here is useful for you to experience the SAP Warehouse Operator app. Post your feedback about SAP Warehouse Operator in the comments section. Start by visiting your SAP Mobile Applications community page and click “follow”.

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