Picking Materials for Outbound Deliveries

Waves are a way of grouping outbound delivery order items, to control warehouse activities such as picking.

One way of creating waves is to manually select items and to combine them to a wave.

Another way to create waves is the automatic creation of the waves using so-called wave templates and condition records for the determination of these wave templates. In this determination process, information can be used from the items to determine the proper wave template and to combine the items in the desired way.

During the grouping of warehouse tasks into warehouse orders, SAP EWM can use one directly assigned warehouse order creation rule, or it uses a search sequence for several warehouse order creation rules. An example could be: rule A, then rule B, then rule C. The sequence is defined and assigned to the so-called activity area to which the selected storage bin for picking belongs. Customizing controls which storage bins (and thus which activity areas) are being considered during picking.

Filter and limit values control which warehouse tasks, and how many warehouse tasks, SAP EWM groups into a warehouse order.

When SAP EWM applies a warehouse order creation rule, it sorts the warehouse tasks according to the sort rule. Individual warehouse order creation rules can contain their own sort rules.

In addition to the sort rules and the filter and limit values, warehouse order creation rules can also contain parameters for packing and consolidation groups. A consolidation group determines the warehouse tasks that are permitted to be packed together.

In SAP S/4HANA, it's possible to generate pick Handling Units (pick-HUs) into which materials are packed during picking. A pick-HU is assigned to a warehouse order. You can then use the pick-HU for shipping or repack the material at a work center. You can either further pack the HU into another packaging material (and thus creating a nested Handling Unit structure), or you can move the material from one HU into another HU.

A user can create a pick-HU manually using the dialog screen on the mobile device that the user uses: The user chooses the packaging material and creates the HU. With the correct set-up of the system, pick-HUs can also be created fully automatically during the creation of the warehouse order. That is of course something that then only happens in the system: The physical packing activities must still be executed by a user, but this user can simply trigger the printing of the needed labels with a push of a button on their mobile device based on the automatically generated packing structure.