Planning the Shipping and Receiving of Products

Shipping and receiving describe the processes that are used to plan and execute processes for your materials coming into the warehouse or leaving the warehouse. Shipping and receiving in SAP EWM covers the following areas:

• Usage of vehicles and transportation units for managing the transports to or from your warehouse

• Loading and unloading, including docking at, or undocking from the door

• Yard Management

Shipping and receiving is also used to integrate SAP EWM with other transportation planning tools available in SAP ERP or SAP TM.

The yard is an enclosed area outside a warehouse where vehicles and transportation units are dealt with, waiting to be dealt with, or waiting to be collected by an external carrier. You can use a yard with basic functions (to control the arrival, unloading or loading, and the leaving of trucks) or with full blown functions (to control the individual movements of trucks). This is called yard management.

Yard Management Setup

A yard is represented by a separate storage type in a warehouse. However, you can also configure it with a separate warehouse number, which must then include a storage type that has the role Yard. In both cases, you can use one yard for multiple warehouses. Conversely, you can define a warehouse with multiple yards.

You map the corresponding storage bins as yard bins, which you can group into yard sections, as in the warehouse. The following structures are possible in a yard:

• Parking spaces:

  A position in the yard where a vehicle or a transportation unit (TU) is parked.

• Checkpoints:

  A location where vehicles and TUs enter or exit the yard. This can represent a physical gate at the yard entrance, or a virtual gate from which data is transmitted electronically.

• Doors:

  A location in the warehouse where goods arrive or leave. The door is an organizational unit that you assign to the warehouse number. It connects the yard to the warehouse. Vehicles and their TUs drive up to the doors of a warehouse to load or unload goods. The doors are in close proximity to the relevant staging areas; you make an assignment between staging areas and doors.

In the yard, you move vehicles or transportation units.

A vehicle is a specialization of a particular means of transport. A vehicle can comprise one or more transportation units and represents the physical entity of the transport vehicle.

A transportation unit is the smallest loadable unit of a vehicle that is used to transport goods.

The TU can be a fixed part of the vehicle. The following figure shows different TUs:

• Vehicle 1: Semi-trailer truck, which equals one TU

• Vehicle 2: Truck with cargo area and trailer, which equals two TUs

• Vehicle 3: Train with a locomotive and three wagons, which equals four TUs

It is not mandatory to use vehicles in shipping and receiving if the features available at transportation unit level are sufficient for your transportation processes.

In shipping and receiving, there are several ways to create transportation units or vehicles, as the following list outlines:

• You can create them manually through the transactions in SAP EWM.

• They can be created automatically through receiving the information as part of the inbound or outbound delivery from ERP.

• You can use the shipping cockpit for outbound planning for the creation of transportation units and assignment of outbound delivery orders.

• Transportation planning in SAP TM or ERP (LE-TRA) can create transportation units or vehicles to send the transportation planning information to SAP EWM.

Yard movements enable you to move TUs from one yard bin to another inside a yard. Examples of yard movements are as follows:

• The TU arrives at the checkpoint and is moved to a parking space or to a door.

• You move a TU from a parking space to the door, or from the door to a parking space.

• You move a TU from one parking space to another, or from one door to another.

The checkpoint is where you register the vehicles and TUs that enter or exit the yard. You can perform this task by setting the status for the arrival at the checkpoint or departure from the checkpoint. This is a prerequisite for yard movements.

It is only with the activation of Yard Management that it is also possible to move a TU in the Yard. Without Yard Management, you just record the arrival and departure of a TU at a checkpoint or a door.

Each time you want to move a TU in the yard, you have to create a Warehouse Task (WT) manually. To do this, you use a special transaction to create WTs in the yard. You can also create and execute yard movements in a radio frequency (RF) environment.

Transportation Units and Deliveries

You assign deliveries to transportation units. This can happen manually during or after the creation of the TU. It can also happen automatically when the TU information is already in the document coming from ERP. In this case, the TU creation and the assignment of the deliveries happens in the background.

While not every customer needs extensive processes in the yard, others may require planning and monitoring features in addition to those provided by SAP EWM yard management. The SAP Yard Logistics solution provides check-in to check-out support for transportation units and is focused on the functionalities of planning, execution, yard operations, yard monitoring and billing. It is based on the structures used in SAP EWM, so it can be used as part of your SAP EWM warehouse, or standalone, for example, in a container terminal.

You can use SAP Dock Appointment Scheduling (DAS) to plan vehicle arrivals in your warehouses efficiently and to collaborate with the parties associated with an appointment.

You can use SAP DAS to schedule loading appointments for loading and unloading vehicles and to get an overview of the workload of a loading point for each day.

Carriers with access to the system can plan loading appointments for their own vehicles directly in the system and update details of their loading appointments.

SAP Dock Appointment Scheduling can be deployed standalone or integrated with a SAP EWM or SAP Yard Logistics system.

You plan loading appointments for vehicles in collaboration with the carriers, and process the loading appointments in the system. As the loading appointment proceeds, the system records the time of each status change for later analysis.

The system can determine the loading point of a loading appointment automatically, based on properties of the loading appointment and loading points. For example, if you have a loading appointment for a delivery of frozen goods, and a designated loading point for frozen goods, the system can automatically determine that the loading appointment should be planned for the loading point for frozen goods.

The system can also determine the duration of a loading appointment automatically, based on the number of packages in the loading appointment, the duration per package, and the amount of offset time a vehicle needs at the dock for activities such as arriving at the dock. For example, for a specific loading point, you can define that unloading 1 package takes 2 minutes, and that you require an offset of 10 minutes for each loading appointment. Using these definitions, the system calculates 30 minutes for a loading appointment with 10 packages to unload.

For a carrier, planning is important to reduce the amount of time a vehicle is not available for use, for example, when it is waiting to be unloaded.

You can allow appointment planners for carriers to plan appointments directly in the system by creating business partner roles for them. This means that the carriers can accurately plan for their vehicles, which results in more accurate scheduling for the warehouse. The appointment planners for carriers can display their own carrier’s appointments only.

The Shipping Cockpit offers a user-centric UI for the shipping office clerk to do the following activities:

• Plan shipping activity outbound deliveries

• Execute tasks

• Monitor outbound operations in the warehouse

Recurring tasks can also be automated and controlled in the Shipping Cockpit.

While SAP EWM includes basic planning functionality to combine deliveries for transportation, SAP offers other, more advanced tools for transportation planning with SAP ERP (LE-TRA) and SAP Transportation Management (TM). When you plan transportation with these tools, the result is represented as a transportation unit in SAP EWM. Conversely, a transportation unit can also be used to send initial transportation information to LE-TRA or SAP TM.

Advanced shipping and receiving does not require the use of a transportation unit for the TM integration anymore. Advanced Shipping and Receiving simplifies communication between the Transportation Management (TM), Extended Warehouse Management (EWM), Inventory Management and Physical Inventory (MM-IM), and Logistics Execution (LE) application components embedded in SAP S/4HANA. It does this by using a harmonized data model, by applying the EDIFACT standard to EDI messages, and by providing dedicated apps and expanding existing apps and RF transactions for shipping and receiving processes.

Advanced shipping and receiving is available for decentral EWM deployment since SAP S/4HANA 2023.