The complexity and scale of automotive and manufacturing organizations naturally presents challenges when it comes to managing their warehouse networks.
SAP’s EWM (extended warehouse management) solution is an industry mainstay, designed to help businesses manage and protect their operations. This article explores how SAP EWM customers in automotive and manufacturing can take their change management to the next level.
Why optimizing SAP EWM is business critical
The automotive and manufacturing sectors are facing three fundamental challenges that make SAP EWM critical:
- Efficiency – Manufacturing a range of vehicles (internal combustion engines and electric), design styles and colors can lead to higher complexity for sourcing and assembly.
- Sustainability – Investors and customers expect broad adoption and reporting of sustainable practices from manufacturers, ranging from electric vehicle offerings to the carbon footprint of their logistics network.
- Visibility – Warehouse customer service teams often find it challenging to reassure customers in real-time without the right level of visibility of external systems, such as transportation, or carrier and third-party supply chain visibility systems.
Factors like the US tariff policies are a prime example of how quickly manufacturers need to be able to pivot and adapt their warehouse and supply chain processes. The current shake-up has led to a surge of supply chain activity as manufacturers opportunistically source parts in anticipation of higher import costs.
It isn’t the first time something like this has happened, and it won’t be the last. Delivering critical, quality changes at speed is what SAP’s EWM solution is designed to help organizations achieve. But many businesses are not using it in an optimized way.
That’s why we created our SAP change design and risk analysis software, ActiveDiscover, to help the automotive and manufacturing industries get the most value out of their SAP investments.
How ActiveDiscover supports EWM for the automotive and manufacturing industry
How to optimize SAP EWM for efficiency
Advanced Production Integration, a complex capability within EWM, integrates processes between two distinct operations, namely the warehouse and production process. This enables the efficient staging of materials needed for production and accurately records the consumption of those materials once used.
Change teams can use ActiveDiscover to identify the cascading impact of multiple customized entities that enable the advanced production integration capability, which requires specific mapping between the ERP and EWM systems.
Analyzing such complex object dependencies during the design phase enables teams to gauge the scope and magnitude of changes required. With this early insight, they can then allocate the right technical and functional resources, including input from business users to inform the user experience and set performance expectations more comprehensively.
Additionally, ActiveDiscover can automatically report key object differences between development and production systems. These differences enable the change team to identify whether the intended changes are performed against the right object versions or determine whether a certain low-level difference goes against a requirement identified by the business user. All this takes place while the change is still in the planning stage to prevent change failure further down the line.
How to optimize SAP EWM for sustainability
One enhancement within EWM that ActiveDiscover can support with is ‘task interleaving’, which enables operators to combine multiple tasks, like picking up and putting away, in a single trip. This approach reduces the amount of ‘dead heading’ by operators, leading to overall reduction in travel time and reduced consumption of electricity.
Like many strategies available in EWM, task interleaving can be configured within the existing structures of EWM via customizing entries. ActiveDiscover provides a comprehensive understanding of how customized entries affect interconnected processes.
By capturing the impact on other systems like pick-up and put-away, ActiveDiscover equips change teams with a complete view of all affected RF logical transactions and business processes. ActiveDiscover’s object linkage capability automatically identifies object dependencies, including queues, queue types, and resource objects, which all need to be factored into the scope of change.
However, task interleaving may only be suitable for certain processes. Identifying the impact early on allows the change team to adjust the design to fully align with the intended scope.
How to optimize SAP EWM for visibility
ActiveDiscover brings the ability to foresee the impact on external systems, such as carriers or third-party software vendors, that provide visibility to shipments as they move along the supply chain.
Smart carrier systems often connect with customer systems to receive real-time updates for global shipments across all modes of transport, whether road, rail, air or sea. These systems use traffic and weather patterns to calculate the expected arrival time for tracked shipments. Knowing and providing the ETA of a shipment carrying critical parts for a dealership, for example, drives good customer service and helps the warehouse to be agile and arrange for a separate expedited shipment to the dealership if necessary.
Change teams can use ActiveDiscover to modify a shipping process within EWM and review the impact on external interfaces, like real-time APIs, along with the frequency of data exchange.
Additionally, usage data harvested by ActiveDiscover over periods of time enables the change team to identify the high/medium/low usage of the interfaces and subsequently factor scalability and performance within the design. Even a 1-2 second delay in users waiting for the RF to present the specific instruction or data can result in significant productivity and cost repercussions over long periods.
How ActiveDiscover can help you
In short, ActiveDiscover enables:
- Automated identification of all object dependencies across the multiple systems and transactions involved
- Early and accurate scope identification and resource planning for change impacts on external systems
- Usage data tied to logical transactions to quantify and prioritize deployment strategies and user acceptance activities for critical manufacturing processes
As a result, businesses can expect:
- Less time and effort spent on identifying the impact of change in EWM implementations
- Timely involvement of internal or external resources through the change lifecycle
- Delivery of changes more closely aligned with the timeline expected by the business
Want to see ActiveDiscover in action? Book a demo with us today.
Alternatively, you can download our eBook on SAP EWM.
Author bio
Rishabh Singhvi joined Basis Technologies in August 2024 as a Senior Solutions Consultant. He has more than 10 years of warehouse software expertise in implementations and enterprise sales as a software consultant. Applying his technical and functional knowledge of EWM combined with his warehouse industry experience, Rishabh has created software solutions for Fortune 500 customers to meet their growing business needs. Whether you’ve already implemented EWM or are looking to transition to EWM on S/4 HANA, Rishabh offers perspectives on how to leverage Basis Technologies products to unlock your potential with SAP systems.