RE:[sap-log-mm] Storage locations in a plant

Posted by Sap Land Monday, 19 September 2011 05:20

Posted by ravi_nadendla (Business Analyst)
on Sep 19 at 8:21 AM

Thanks Dave. Your explanation is very good.

---------------Original Message---------------
From: Dave Thornburgh
Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2011 1:19 AM
Subject: Storage locations in a plant

Ravi -

That's entirely true - but the meaning of that statement is way more detailed than you might think.

The use of transfer orders in the warehouse has a high price tag in terms of all of the creating, handling, and confirming of transfer orders. For a simple location with straightforward putaway, picking, and handling processes, it can be a lot of overhead without a lot of perceived benefit. For a more complex location with complex processes, it becomes absolutely essential to use TO's to maintain sanity. Without transfer orders, storage types, storage bins, WM movement types, etc., it is difficult to do (seemingly simple) things like: tracking a single material with quantities in several bins at the same time; optimize picking area replenishment; distribute and manage picking or putaway workload; physical inventory by bin instead of by material plant-wide.

Your client's desire to use storage locations in place of WM is scary to think about. All of the WM transactions that they would be avoiding would need to be replaced by IM transactions to accomplish the same things. (By contrast, with Lean WM, the extra movements and such are simply not done). A lot of WM functionality that was designed into WM but not IM would not be available, and the data maintenance necessary would be monstrous.

To make a long story short, SAP designed WM for companies that need it. Your customer either doesn't need it and should go Lean, or they do need it but shouldn't try to reinvent it by using IM in a way it wasn't designed to handle. I suspect that if they want over 1000 "locations", they're going to need full WM.

So yes, WM basically means transfer orders - but using them vastly expands what you can do.

Dave

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