Connecting an External Warehouse Management System (SAP Library

Connecting an External Warehouse Management System

Use

Your Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP System) is an SAP R/3 System, to which you connect an external system that that takes on all warehouse controlling and warehouse management functions for the entire warehouse.

The reasons for connecting an external system to an SAP R/3 System as a complete warehouse management system include:

Along side a fully auomated warehouse, there are no other storage types which you manage with the Warehouse Management system (WMS).

You implement the SAP ERP System in a storage area, which is already managed by an external system. You want to retain this warehouse management system.

Connection via the interface to the decentralized WMS

For more information, see Decentralized Warehouse Management.

Connection via lean WM

You use lean WM to communicate between the external warehouse management system and the SAP ERP System.

You set up the interface between the WMS and the external system in the Customizing for Warehouse Management under Interfaces ® External Systems ® Configure Warehouse Management.

You define the warehouse managed by the external system as a storage type in the WMS.

Either you define one fixed storage bin per material in this storage type, in order to be able to manage the stocks for each material in the storage type and control inventory activities,

Or you define several storage bins in the warehouse type, which do not correspond to the physical storage bins. In doing so, you allow addition to existing stock for this storage type, so that the system always fills one storage bin with one material. The system cumulates the stocks of a material in one storage bin. A new material always goes into a new storage bin.

Note

The storage bins that you created in the WMS for the individual materials have no significance for the external system.

Connection via component interfaces

The external warehouse management system communicates with the SAP ERP System via several component interfaces:

Communication with Inventory Management (MM-IM)

Transmission of goods movements occurs via the message type MBGMCR.

For more information, see Inventory Management and Physical Inventory ® Maintain Customer Exits and Business Add-Ins ® Maintain Customer Exits for Inventory Management (for MB_CF001) and Maintain Business Add-Ins for Inventory Management (for BAdI MB_DOCUMENT_BADI) in the Implementation Guide for Materials Management.

Communication with Production Planning (PP)

In Production Planning, there is a user exit for production orders. You can find this user exit via transaction /nCMOD for package CO.

Communication to Sales and Distribution (SD)

For more information, see Electronic Data Interchange/Idoc Interface (SD-EDI).