Show TOC

Process documentationMerchandise Distribution: Recipient-Driven Flow-Through

 

When you receive goods, it can be the case that you are unable to send the goods to a final ship-to party completely. This can affect products that are delivered in an unpacked state, or whole handling units. In this case, you can move the goods after goods receipt to a cross-docking storage type that you are using as a repacking area.

If you repack the goods in the cross-docking storage type, the workflows are different for recipient-driven flow-through and product-driven flow-through. In recipient-driven flow-through, you put together one pick handling unit for each customer. As a picker, you pick up the pick handling unit, and go to the storage bins from which you have to pick the products. You put the products into the pick handling unit, and take the entire packed pick handling unit to goods issue.

Prerequisites

  • You have defined a warehouse order creation rule in Customizing, which ensures that all warehouse orders contains one consolidation group only, so that processing the warehouse orders in the radio frequency environment is as simple as possible. For more information, see Customizing for Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) under Start of the navigation path Cross-Process Settings Next navigation step Warehouse Order Next navigation step Define Creation Rule for Warehouse Orders End of the navigation path.

  • If you want to perform a customer-specific quantity adjustment on the outbound delivery order quantities in the flow-through process, you can use Business Add-In /SCWM/EX_MEDI_AQTY BAdI: Quantity Adjustment. For more information, see the BAdI documenation in Customizing for Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) under Start of the navigation path Business Add-Ins (BAdIs) for Extended Warehouse Management Next navigation step Cross-Process Settings Next navigation step Cross-Docking (CD) Next navigation step Planned Cross-Docking Next navigation step Merchandise Distribution End of the navigation path.

For more information about prerequisites, see Merchandise Distribution in the "Prerequisites" section.

Process

You can use process-oriented storage control to perform different variants of the warehouse-internal process flow for a merchandise distribution using recipient-driven flow-through.

Note Note

You can only use process-oriented storage control with handling units. If you receive unpacked products and still want to use process-oriented storage control, you must generate handling units in EWM and pack the products.

End of the note.

The following figure shows you an example of a warehouse-internal process flow using recipient-driven flow-through.

  1. SAP ERP sends all relevant inbound and outbound delivery documents to EWM and triggers push or pull.

    • If SAP ERP generates collective orders due to stock transport orders or sales orders, it updates the merchandise distribution data (pull).

    • If SAP ERP generates vendor orders and stock transport orders using an allocation table, it also updates the merchandise distribution data. (push).

    SAP ERP then generates inbound and outbound delivery documents and sends these to EWM. EWM generates relevant inbound deliveries and outbound delivery orders.

  2. You receive an inbound delivery containing handling units that have different products, and post goods receipt.

    SAP ERP updates the inbound delivery document and posts goods receipt.

    You can already perform a quantity adjustment of the outbound delivery orders at this point. On the SAP Easy Access screen, choose Start of the navigation path Delivery Processing Next navigation step Inbound Delivery Next navigation step Merchandise Distribution: Maintain Quantity Adjustment (Flow-Through) End of the navigation path.

  3. You first generate unloading warehouse tasks for the goods receipt, and confirm these manually or automatically.

    Handling unit warehouse tasks are created for the cross-docking storage type, corresponding to the putaway strategies.

  4. You move the handling units to the cross-docking storage type and confirm the warehouse tasks.

    Since the quantity adjustment is to be performed before the pick warehouse tasks are created, this is the latest point at which you can perform the quantity adjustment of the outbound delivery orders.

  5. You release the relevant wave, and thus trigger creation of the pick warehouse tasks. Pick warehouse tasks for the goods issue are generated. EWM can provide you with optimal support in the radio frequency environment, by bundling warehouse tasks into warehouse orders that contain one consolidation group only, according to Customizing. This enables EWM to keep the warehouse tasks of these warehouse orders together. A prerequisite for this is that you have defined a corresponding warehouse order creation rule.

  6. You pick the products in customer-specific handling units, and move the handling units to goods issue.

  7. You confirm the pick warehouse tasks. EWM generates warehouse tasks for loading.

  8. You load the handling units and confirm the loading warehouse tasks. EWM posts goods issue and updates the outbound delivery order. SAP ERP also posts goods issue and updates the outbound delivery document.