Automatic Staging Area Assignment to TUs

You can use the report /SCWM/R_TUDLV_AUTOPLAN_TU to plan staging area and staging bay assignments for transportation unit (TU) activities. The report selects TUs and determines staging bays according to the criteria of deliveries assigned to the TUs. Possible staging areas or bays are checked to see whether they are free in the specific time slots required by the TUs. When free staging area or bays have been determined, the report updates the staging area information in the delivery items assigned to the TUs. This report supports the shipping cockpit by assigning staging areas automatically to delivery items.

Business Scenario

The shipping office clerk has created several TU activities for the next working days. The TUs were either created directly in SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) or in an external transportation planning system (SAP TM or LE-TRA component in SAP ERP).

The report /SCWM/R_TUDLV_AUTOPLAN_TU runs in a background job overnight to plan the staging bays for the delivery assigned to TUs. The report searches for suitable times where staging bays are not occupied completely. The report updates the staging area or bay in the delivery items after successful determination. It is still possible to make manual changes in the shipping cockpit.

The actual selection of free staging areas depends on the staging area block duration of the TUs. In a run of the report, selected TUs with relatively long staging area block durations will be planned to staging areas or bays before the selected TUs with shorter block durations are planned. Staging areas with a lower staging occupancy are considered for the TUs with long block durations before staging areas with relatively dense occupancies are considered for the TUs with shorter block duration.

The report does not reschedule existing staging area occupations. Only TUs with deliveries that are relevant for staging area planning are part of the staging area planning. TUs with assigned deliveries that already have staging area information or bay information are not replanned.

Prerequisites

You have defined storage types with the storage type role D – Staging Area Group in Customizing for Extended Warehouse Management under Start of the navigation path Master Data Next navigation step Define Storage Type End of the navigation path .

The following options are available:

Option	Description
Not Generic (Storage Type, Storage Section, and Storage Bin)	Automatic staging area planning will determine a staging bay and it will update the staging bay in the delivery items.
1 – Storage Type and Storage Section	Automatic staging area planning will determine only a staging area free during the staging time of the TU. A staging bay will not be determined.
2 – Only Storage Type	Automatic staging area planning will neither plan staging bay nor staging area for delivery items with such a staging area group assigned.

For your staging area groups, you have defined staging areas in Customizing for Extended Warehouse Management under Master Data Define Staging Area . The Staging Area Bin Capacity field indicates how many TU activities can be staged at the same time on a staging bay in this staging area. If you leave this field blank, the system interprets it as “only one TU at a time”. The capacity for parallel staging of TUs in the staging area is calculated by the number of bins assigned to the area multiplied by the staging area bin capacity.
You have created storage bins that act as staging bays in your staging area. You can do this on the SAP Easy Access screen for Extended Warehouse Management under Master Data Storage Bin .
For more information, see Staging Area.
You have defined TU profiles for your TU activities that include a staging area block duration. You can do this in Customizing for Extended Warehouse Management under Cross-Process Settings Shipping and Receiving Define TU Profile . The staging area block duration defines for how long the staging area or bay has to be blocked to stage the delivery items assigned to a TU.
If the block duration in the TU profile is blank, no time will be blocked for staging. If a TU profile cannot be determined, the TU activity times are used as the block duration.
You have set up staging area determination for outbound delivery items. You can do this on the SAP Easy Access screen for Extended Warehouse Management under Settings Shipping & Receiving Staging Area and Door Determination (Outbound) . TUs that are to be planned by the report should only have the staging area group determined in the assigned delivery items. The report only considers TUs with assigned items where the staging area group has been determined. Delivery items that already have an assigned staging area or staging bin are not considered.

Note
To make blank entries for the staging area in this Customizing activity, you must first define a staging area with a blank ID in the Customizing activity Master Data Define Staging Area .

End of the note.
The report only uses TU activities that have the status Planned Times Fixed. You can set this status manually in the shipping cockpit, or it can be set automatically if TUs are created from an external transportation planning system.

The user who runs the report has at least the authorizations of the user role /SCWM/SO_CLERK or /SCWM/EXPERT.

Features

You can run this report as a background job or execute it directly in the foreground.
You can fill in the selection criteria in the Transportation Unit section according to your preferences for TU selection.
For example, you could create a selection variant with a planned route departure date occurring in the next few days, in combination with particular TU attributes such as carrier or means of transport.
You must select the Staging Area Planning checkbox.
You can combine this with the automatic wave creation; in this case, wave creation takes place after staging area planning. Therefore, TUs that have a staging area assigned will have accurate information for creation of the staging warehouse tasks for the delivery items. TUs that are not considered for staging area planning will also be part of wave creation. Only TUs for which automatic staging area planning failed are not included in wave creation, for example, because there were no free staging areas. For more information, see Automatic Wave Creation for TUs.
The protocol is written under the object /SCWM/SHP_RCV when the report is run.
You can use the Business Add-In (BAdI) Automatic Planning of Staging Area to add your own logic to the automatic staging area assignments.
You can alter the assignments that were proposed by the SAP EWM standard logic, or skip the standard logic completely and plan the staging area assignments completely with your own logic. For more information, see the documentation for this BAdI in Customizing for Extended Warehouse Management under Business Add-Ins (BAdIs) for Extended Warehouse Management Cross-Process Settings Shipping and Receiving Automatic Planning Enhancements to Automatic Planning .