Putaway and Picking Strategies 

In the Warehouse Management (WM) application component, you employ putaway and removal strategies used by the system to search for storage bins in the most expeditious manner.

For inbound movements, in conjunction with controls entered in the material master record, the putaway strategies assist the WM system to utilize the available warehouse capacity, automatically assigning optimum locations for goods received in the warehouse.

For outbound movements, the system uses similar user-defined controls to execute the appropriate picking strategy to assign the best picking location. If you decide to manually process certain stock movements, you can change source and destination storage bins that are automatically proposed by the system.

When the system creates transfer orders to move goods into or out of the warehouse, you do not have to intervene when it comes to finding storage bins. This guarantees that stock movements are processed quickly and consistently. If you need to permanently change the characteristics of these strategies, you can do this at any time using the customizing tasks.

Using the Customizing Application

To define the search strategies in WM, you need to use the customizing application to maintain control data in a number of tables. To customize your system, you use the Warehouse Management Implementation Guide (IMG).

The activities described in this section are generally carried out by the system administrator. They are included here with references to the appropriate sections in the Warehouse Management IMG to provide strategy descriptions and additional information on the corresponding tasks in WM.