Processing Batches

In various industries, particularly in the process industry, you have to work with homogenous partial quantities of a material or product throughout the logistics quantity and value chain.

There are various reasons for this, including the following:

• Legal requirements:

  For example, the guidelines set out by Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) or regulations on hazardous material.

• Defect tracing, callback activities, and regression requirement

• The need for differentiated quantity-based and value-based Inventory Management

  For example, due to heterogeneous yield/result qualities or varying constituents in Production.

• Differences in usage and the monitoring thereof in materials planning in Sales and Production

• Production or procedural requirements:

  For example, settlement of material quantities on the basis of different batch specifications.

A batch describes a quantity or partial quantity of a certain material or product that has been produced according to the same recipe, and represents one homogenous, non-reproducible unit with unique specifications.

Batches are managed centrally as master data in an SAP ERP system. The SAP ERP system distributes batches to all connected SAP EWM systems through the Core Interface (CIF) or through an IDoc, depending on the SAP EWM release. You can also create and change batches in the SAP EWM system. Batch characteristics describe the technical, physical, and/or chemical properties of a batch, and are stored in the classification system.

When you receive material that is batch relevant, a batch must be created before the goods receipt can be posted (as the batch is part of the stock information). The batch creation can happen at various times.

The batch can be created before you create the inbound delivery in ERP and directly entered in that inbound delivery. You can also create a batch in ERP during the creation of the ERP inbound delivery (customizing must be set up accordingly).

With an active CIF model, the batch data is immediately distributed and the batch information of the ERP inbound delivery is also available in the SAP EWM inbound delivery.

For an SAP S/4HANA based decentral EWM the distribution is done through an IDoc. While this usually requires the evaluation of change pointers and the scheduling of the transfer of this IDoc, the SAP Note "2881061 - Decentralized EWM: Enhanced Settings for ALE Data Transfer" describes what to implement to overcome this limitation.

Batch Creation in EWM Inbound Delivery

The batch can also be created in SAP EWM. In that case, it is automatically created in the background in ERP using a remote function call.

In a SCM based EWM the transaction /SCWM/WM_BATCH_MAINT can be used to create, change, and display batches. This transaction is not available in an SAP S/4HANA based EWM.

The batch can also be created in SAP EWM in the inbound delivery itself. In this case, in the standard, only the standard characteristics production date, shelf life expiration date, and country of origin can be maintained directly. Other characteristics must be maintained in the batch master record. This can of course be done in ERP. In a SCM based EWM it can be done with the transaction /SCWM/WM_BATCH_MAINT. Batch characteristics can also be changed during quality inspection in SAP EWM, independent if it is SCM or SAP S/4HANA based.

From SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS01 it is also possible to change or create the batch in the decentralized EWM system with the standard batch transactions.

You can assign batches to be sold or picked manually at certain points, but it can be done automatically using batch determination, which uses condition technique. This enables you to define your own search strategies by choosing the relevant key fields from the business transaction to search for batches. For example, you choose the combination of customer and material and then specify the criteria for batch selection.

The batch can be determined automatically in the sales order. This batch is then copied into the ERP outbound delivery and the SAP EWM outbound delivery order and picking is limited to quants that are part of this batch. However, in a sales order, batch splits are not possible. This means that the system assigns one batch only. If this batch does not have the required quantity, the rest of the sales order is never fulfilled.

During a batch determination in a delivery, the system always creates a batch split. The system can select as many batches as are required to fulfill the requested quantity, as long as the batch determination criteria are fulfilled. In the case where not enough stock is available in the right batches, the sales order is still open and can be fulfilled later when new batches with the required criteria are available.

From a warehouse point-of-view, a batch assigned in the ERP outbound delivery may not be the best choice, because the sort criteria for the batch determination do not reflect any picking strategies. SAP EWM does not have batch determination functionality. However, the interface can be set up so that ERP batch determination in the outbound delivery is only being used to determine the batch determination criteria that needs to be fulfilled, without assigning a batch. These criteria are then passed on to SAP EWM and used to determine the best quant from a warehouse picking strategy, while fulfilling the batch determination requirement.