You must decide the cross-docking relevance before the products arrive in the warehouse and before you release the outbound delivery.
Transportation Cross-Docking
Transportation cross-docking (TCD) means that goods are not delivered directly from the delivering warehouse to a ship-to-party. Instead, the ordered goods are moved (with other purchased goods) to an interim warehouse and that is the cross-docking warehouse.
This is ideal if you have different warehouses in your company, which are on pre-defined routes and are supplied regularly with transports. It might not be ideal to transport the outbound delivery directly to the ship-to-party. It might be more logical to use a standard transport from one warehouse to another, and then deliver the customer order from the interim-warehouse. If the truck arrives in the interim cross-docking warehouse and is unloaded, the HU for the ship-to-party can be forwarded to the GI-zone. If the items are packed on a consolidated HU, you can use the process-oriented storage control to move the HU to the de-consolidation station, where it can be unpacked and repacked. From the de-consolidation station, the HU for the outbound delivery is moved to the GI-zone and the other HU is put away.
Cross-docking Routes
The decision to use transportation cross-docking is made during SAP EWM route determination for the outbound delivery order. Using this scenario, special cross-docking routes are required. These are the opposite of linear routes, which map the direct route from the delivery plant to the ship-to-party. Cross-docking routes are created for a specific location, and two linear routes (the incoming route and the outgoing route) are assigned to the cross-docking route.
As a result, two deliveries are created: an inbound delivery into the cross-docking warehouse and an outbound delivery from the cross-docking warehouse to the customer (the final ship-to-party). Both deliveries are assigned a TCD process-number. These deliveries are transferred to ERP and a transfer posting is made for the respective goods from the issuing storage location to a TCD storage location. The issuing plant retains ownership until the goods issue is posted for the outbound delivery of the final ship-to-party.
A variant of TCD is supplier cross-docking. In this case, the supplier sends the purchased goods to at least one cross-docking warehouse (instead of sending the goods directly to the receiving warehouse). The goal is to optimize transportation and keep deliveries in a single transport. As a prerequisite, you must use and develop a BAdI.
Merchandise Distribution
With merchandise distribution, you plan and control the flow of merchandise from a vendor through to a recipient. The merchandise can pass through a distribution center or, several distribution centers. The recipient is known at the time of procurement. Merchandise distribution is planned either using an allocation table (push) or a collective purchase order (pull). If the merchandise goes through a distribution center, three processing methods are possible:
- Cross-docking
- Flow-through
- Putaway
Hint
To use merchandise distribution with decentral EWM, the following are the prerequisites on the ERP side: SAP ERP 6.0 with EhP 4, Business Function Retail CD/FT_EWM Integration and Solution SAP Retail.
Merchandise Distribution Cross-Docking
The process starts in ERP. Based on customer orders or stock transport orders, you create collective purchase orders or stock transport orders. Customer orders or purchase orders are created based on an allocation table. In both cases merchandise distribution data is updated and ERP creates the inbound and (the planned) outbound deliveries, and then transfers them to SAP EWM.
After the physical goods arrive on the GR-zone, the goods are forwarded to the GI-zone and the goods issue is posted.
If the incoming goods are packed in a HU, you can use the process-oriented storage control for the internal movements. Merchandise distribution cross-docking is only possible when the delivered goods are forwarded directly to the ship-to-party.
Merchandise Distribution Flow-Through
When the HU that is received contains different products and the complete HU cannot be sent to the final ship-to-party, you must transfer the goods to a cross-docking storage type which is then used as a repacking area. You can repack based on the recipient or the product.
Recipient-Driven Flow-Through
After posting the goods receipt, and before creating the pick-warehouse task, the "quantity adjustment for the outbound delivery orders" is executed. (The menu path for this is: EWM → Delivery Processing → Inbound Delivery → Merchandise Distribution: Maintain Quantity Adjustment Flow-Through).
The HU received is moved to the cross-docking storage type where it is unpacked and re-packed in customer-specific pick HUs. Recipient-driven flow-through means that the picker takes a customer specific pick-HU and packs the required products into that pick-HU. For each ship-to-party, an individual warehouse order is created to transfer the appropriate pick HU to the GI-zone.
Product-Driven Flow-Through
The difference with the product-driven flow-through is in the way that the picker packs the pick-HU. With product-driven flow-through, the picker prepares for product-specific HUs in advance and sends the products of each delivered HU to the product-specific handling unit. Completing the process step for the HU creates a warehouse task to transfer the pick-HUs to the GI-zone.
