Managing a warehouse and the associated supply chain is like managing a row of dominoes; if the individual pieces are not aligned, it disrupts the sequence. All it takes is one process within the system to be delayed, and havoc will ensue.

Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) from SAP is an integral tool for ensuring the processes throughout a warehouse runs smoothly. It connects everything together from stockkeeping to packing to delivery so that everything can run on time – but there are many moving parts and dependencies.

The challenges of EWM

When it comes to warehouse management, the challenges and opportunities facing each organization are entirely unique. Everything from storage sizes and processes need to be clearly defined, so EWM is designed to be highly customizable. High levels of customization inevitably come with challenges; new updates and support packages from SAP may be incompatible with some parts of the system. Also, new business-driven changes are often demanded at a pace that doesn’t allow for stretched resources to adequately complete manual design and planning phases.

EWM’s integration complexity adds an extra level of risk. Systems are usually interconnected and highly dependent on integrations with other products like Transport Management, Logistics Systems and Finance for instance. EWM needs to know information on transport orders, incoming and outgoing deliveries, the number plates of truck and trailer combinations, invoicing, and a whole lot more, so it has to engage with other systems regularly. When it comes to changing or updating such an interdependent system, should anything go wrong, those tumbling dominoes can scatter and the effect it could have on other systems within the enterprise is cause for caution.

A real-world example

One company I spoke to saw this with their handheld SAP-powered barcode readers. These readers were critical to the shop floor, warehouse, and cold freight-door of dispatch. For reasons that no one could remember, the configuration of these scanners was hidden from standard searches or where-used lists.

When a minor change to the screen design of the readers was proposed to make stock-check more efficient, this change was moved through the lifecycle and deployed. But because no one had access to the scanner configurations, this small, innocent change had unforeseen dependencies. Even though the update was successful on the target barcode readers, it also impacted other screens that had not been planned for, and more importantly, that the warehouse team had not been trained for. This meant that during that day, new fields went unfilled, errors piled up, and rejections and faults crept in.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place

Enterprises are left with two options, both of which are unfavourable: either make changes to your system and expose it to risk, or don’t make any changes to your system at the pace the business needs and stagnate. This means missing out on everything from small changes all the way up to large digital transformation projects, putting your enterprise one step behind the competition. It is worth considering the business-critical impacts of both: 

1 Take the risk and change without visibility

There are obvious problems here, especially when it comes to warehousing, logistics, and EWM. If you have to maintain a chain of temperature (like with frozen goods or flowers, for example), are you prepared to throw away a lot of stock should the change go wrong? If you have time-sensitive deliveries to make in the lead up to events like Christmas or Easter, can your enterprise withstand a warehouse shutdown, or do you have restrictive processes in place to manage the risk and put a blanket freeze on all changes?

2 Delay change or avoid it altogether

Alternatively, you may decide to stick with your current system due to the fear of change. This is more than understandable given the consequences of anything going wrong, but the problem with just sticking to the status quo is that it quickly becomes untenable. Firstly, you’ve lost your chance to gain a competitive advantage through early digital transformation. Secondly, you then have to play catch up, which costs time and money. Finally, your system will be prone to breaking anyway – the one thing you were trying to avoid – as it will be too old to update or support.

There is another way

The greatest chance you’ll ever have of influencing the quality of something is before you’ve committed to it. Nobody wants to sink costs into something, realize it’s not right and be forced back to the drawing board. In an ideal world, you’d be able to plan and scope hypothetical scenarios before a single workbench transport has even been created.

It’s like the success of a new warehouse layout being determined by the initial planning stages. If the warehouse manager thoroughly plans the layout, scopes out the workflow, and designs efficient storage and retrieval systems before any physical changes are made, the warehouse operations will run smoothly, efficiently, and with minimal disruptions. Skipping or rushing through these early stages will lead to bottlenecks, misplaced inventory, and increased operational costs, just as poor initial planning and design in SAP changes can lead to project delays, increased costs, and system inefficiencies. 

 Before it gets to the developer, having the information already in place to understand whether the change they’ll construct will influence any other part of the system, helps avoid these issues from the very start. The Development teams, QA and Deployment managers then gain visibility into which EWM processes will be affected, and they’ve all had time to plan the when, what and who of it all. 

Change without visibility is eradicated and teams no longer need to keep their fingers crossed when deploying change and knocking over that first domino.

That is the power of ActiveDiscover

Through ActiveDiscover and its EWM extension, you can bake in quality, for more informed, data-driven decisions. The greater visibility to all stakeholders, from the design phase onward, via predictive analytics, hypotheticals and dependency checks means you can understand the impact of change before it happens, ensuring a more robust supply chain with greater operational resilience. 

With real-time insights, you can ensure continuous improvement and constant evolution without compromize. Most importantly, you can eliminate risk that hampers warehouse operations.

Learn more about ActiveDiscover’s EWM Extension.