SAP WM Offline Procedures

[Former Member]

I am looking for ideas and recommendations on SAP WM offline tracking and catch-up procedures.  These procedures would also be the disaster recovery plan in a situation where SAP is unavailable and the business must continue to run.

Prior to our next Go-Live, previously deployed businesses must take some downtime/SAP offline time while the cookbook of transport requests is moved to production and we shake out the system.  Because of this offline time, and in case something goes awry and we are down for a longer period, we need to have tracking procedures in place and a plan to catch up all the movements in SAP.

Has anyone created a WM offline procedure in the past?  How did you track all the warehouse movements?  How did you "catch them up" when SAP was back online?

[JL23 · Accepted solution]

Is your WM a stand-alone system? From where do you get the paperwork that has to accompany a delivery?

We could not do much more than cleaning the desk, which means doing the internal physical movements for which we already have printed TOs.

And then it is just like 30 years ago, paper piles on the desk, one for the TOs that need to be confirmed, handwritten notes with info about a putaway for which the receipt is not yet posted.

But in general the whole is just going down to zero and real cleaning work with brooms instead of moving materials. If the system is down then we cannot get labels for new receipts and no labels for preparing material for deliveries. We can call the police to control the traffic at the Autobahn as the truck cue will go back to last exit.

The best thing you can do is a thorough integration test - not just for the new process- as well as regression test to ensure that old process still run. And once satisfied, then move the transports to production. The most chaos I see is caused by eternal delays of customizing and workbench transports to production.

[Former Member]

Thanks Jurgen for describing your offline process.  It sounds similar to ours at present - paper-based like 30 years ago!

We run both Lean and Full ECC WM variations, but in this scenario we're mostly concerned with the Full WM sites.  Some manage only using quants, while others use SU & HU management.  We don't use batch.

Shipping paperwork is generated out of ECC, but in an offline mode we have templates that the warehouses populate manually.  We don't generally print TOs and instead just use RF devices.  To support picking deliveries for an expected downtime, the warehouse prints the due out report (VL10 variation) at the delivery item level as a reference.

One of our warehouses created a process where they use an RF device to scan pallet numbers into a spreadsheet and then go to the office to download the data into the offline shipping paperwork template.  It's a novel idea, and our businesses are now pushing for something more robust.

Since we have RF devices at our disposal, I am considering making a mobile-friendly webpage with a few tracking options, so at least we can record the data in a centralized database and eliminate the paper chaos.  This would also enable IT to support the "catch-up" postings.

[Former Member]

Hi Sarah,

You are already using RF devices, so why dont you think of going online instead of still depending on offiline. Recently we did a module implementation for one of our client and we initially thought of going for an offline procedure, but then finally we went for an online procedure as it eliminated lot of unnecessary work and time saving. Also we get an online picture of where the materials are at the moment. The main thing that we need to worry when going online is to ensure a robust connection to network.

Regards,

Vineeth

[Former Member]

Hi,

Please provide more details on your current

WM set-up level.

If any advanced technologies are integrated to your system?

Give more insights into your requirement?

Regards,

Vineeth