Understand SAP EWM

2-Step Picking

Note: This post belongs to the blog-series ‘Understand SAP EWM 2-step picking’. The purpose of these series of blog-posts is to explain the concepts of the core features of SAP EWM in a simple way. We want to focus on the basic understanding rather than the smallest details.

As usual, we will go into the real world before we look into the system.

We are sure that most of you have experienced or can still enjoy Sunday afternoon lunch with the whole family at your mother’s place. All your loved ones sitting around a big table, having some good food.

Now imagine the way that the food has to take to get from the kitchen on your plate, banana leaf, bowl or whatever you are using. Usually your mum will not take your sisters plate fill it in the kitchen with all the components of the lunch, walk back to the living room, bring it to your sisters place at the table and to the same thing for everybody else.

She will rather grab the all the different pots with the components and bring the pots to the table. Well-educated sons will of course help here but let us assume mum has to do everything on her own. So all pots are on the table and in this second step everybody grabs what she/he likes in order to fill her/his plate.

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You see that the total travel distance for your mum decreases a lot while the effort for grabbing and moving food from the pots to the plates stays the same. So in total – as long as your mum is not eating alone – we are better off the with second approach. At least in terms of total travel distance. We think that was pretty easy to understand. So let us have a quick look on how this process can be setup in the system. Instead of the family sitting at the table waiting for food, we do now have a bunch of delivery items sitting in a wave, waiting to be released. You know this picture from previous blog posts we assume:

Now the difference is that we do not only release the wave but rather release a first and then release a second step. Within the first step we combine delivery items requesting the same material into warehouse tasks. We create these warehouse tasks in order to move the total quantity for this material from the source bin to an intermediate bin. This intermediate bin is our table where the whole family is sitting. Once the stock has arrived on this bin we release the wave a second time in order to create the warehouse tasks for the second step of the picking process. Within this second step we pick on delivery item level so we separate the total quantity which has been picked based on the requested quantity of each delivery item. Depending on the consolidation group the stock might go into separate or shared pick HUs but – independent from this – both variants complete the picking process here and trigger the next step of our outbound storage process.

To sum it up from process perspective –

We optimize the picking by collectively removing products which are requested by multiple different ODO items. This way we minimize the picking operations and reduce the total travel distance.

The customizing is pretty straightforward here. Just a quick look as the purpose of this video is not to guide you through the implementation.

Apart from types & bins for intermediate storage you need to activate 2-step picking on warehouse level and assign a warehouse process type for the withdrawal step. In addition you need a dedicated storage type search sequence for the withdrawal step. This record is looking at the initial source bin. An additional record needs the intermediate storage type as a source bin to help creating the final warehouse task for the distribution from the intermediate bin.

For all products which have 2-step picking activated in master data we will then pick as described above. That’s it. 2-step picking!

I hope this blog post provides value to you and you could learn something. Please feel free to subscribe to my blog updates or my youtube channel in case you want to be notified about new posts!

Understand SAP EWM

2-Step Picking

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