Product Information
SAP S/4HANA warehousing options
Advanced, Basic, Embedded, Decentral, Cloud What’s the difference?
SAP has many warehousing options to suit different levels of warehousing from classic Inventory Management, Basic Warehouse Management and Extended Warehouse Management. In this blog I’ll try to demystify SAP warehousing so that you can make a more informed decision when choosing a warehousing solution.
I’ll cover the following points
- Basic vs Advanced
- Deployment options
- Future proofing your solution
- SAP Warehouse Management in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
Basic vs Advanced
First, let’s understand the difference between SAP Basic Warehouse Management and SAP Basic Warehouse Management. SAP Basic Warehouse Management covers most standard warehousing features such as receiving, putaway, stock counting, picking, goods issue…etc… When a customer purchases SAP S/4HANA, SAP Basic Warehouse Management is included with no extra license required.
Can you use scanners with SAP Basic Warehouse Management? YES
Customers that require any of the advanced features, will need to procure an additional license for SAP Extended Warehouse Management. Below is a side-by-side comparison.
Deployment Options
SAP EWM can be deployed as Extra-Stack(side-car), previously called “Decentral” SAP Extended Warehouse Management, this deployment option is always Advanced.
As of SAP S/4HANA 1610, SAP EWM can be deployed In-Stack, this is an embedded deployment of SAP EWM.
Extra-Stack
- Focus on High-volume warehousing, optimization & automation, regional operations
- Dedicated performance for warehouse operations
- Deployment of SAP EWM server close to warehouse or in same region / time-zone
- Connect multiple SAP ERP Systems to a single standalone SAP EWM
- S/4HANA where only SAP EWM is used to support warehouse operations
- Independency of downtimes of the ERP system
- Connecting to SAP ERP Central Component and SAP S/4HANA systems
In-Stack
- One System: Direct usage of master data
- Avoid data redundancy: Avoid redundant objects and Direct access to central objects
- Simplification and reduction of Data Redundancy
- Direct read of actual data
SAP Warehouse Management in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
Warehousing is available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud(Public Cloud), this is not the full scope of SAP Extended Warehouse Management, however, this product has many advanced features that are cloud-native for a modern Supply Chain. There are standard integrations available to SAP Extended Warehouse Management. New features are being released every quarter, this is the latest release.
Future Proofing your solution
It’s important to analyze your business requirements to select the option that will best suit your current position and future growth of the business. E.g. the project work to setup a basic warehouse management will not be lost if an organization chooses to turn on advanced features in the the future as advanced Extended Warehouse Management features use all the basic enterprise structures and processes of Basic Warehouse Management.
I hope this blog helped to demystify the warehousing options from SAP, between the different deployment options and licensing of products. If you have any questions, please feel free to post it below or leave a comment.
In my next blog I plan to highlight the benefits of having a connected Logistics platform. Thank you for reading my blog, please share your feedback in the comments section.
For more updates on SAP Extended Warehouse Management please visit
https://community.sap.com/topics/extended-warehouse-management
If you have any questions on Extended Warehouse Management please visit https://answers.sap.com/index.html
Community https://people.sap.com/ravinelala25
Is Warehouse Cloud can be use with OnPremise SAP S/4HANA to benefit from WMS cloud with a customized ERP?
Hi Youri
Yes, SAP EWM, Private Edition(Cloud) can be integrated with an On-Premise ERP.