As SAP solutions continue to evolve and the push towards the cloud picks up speed, transformations to the latest SAP products are more important than ever. Businesses must migrate legacy systems like SAP Warehouse Management (WM) and Logistics Execution – Transportation (LE-TRA) to the latest releases of SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) and SAP Transportation Management (TM). In this article, you’ll learn about the requirement to migrate from SAP WM to SAP EWM.
What's possible? Options for your transformation
In 2027, general maintenance will end for SAP WM. As an SAP customer, you have several options regarding the transformation of your current SAP WM system:
- Continue with SAP WM for the short term. An option to extend maintenance of SAP WM is available until 2030. This extension will require additional support and maintenance fees.
- Use compatibility mode on S/4HANA, which lets you use the ECC (ERP Central Component) ERP settings in your new warehouse management system. This option is restricted and is only available until 2025.
- Use SAP Stock Room Management for simple warehouse operations. This option is in S/4HANA, but it is not developed further by SAP.
- Implement SAP EWM (Basic or Advanced) before the maintenance and compatibility mode deadlines.
Given the limitations and cost of other options, 4flow recommends SAP customers migrate to SAP EWM to achieve the full benefits of this advanced solution.
How to plan your migration to SAP EWM
The time required to transform the current SAP WM solution to SAP EWM can be significant, considering factors such as brownfield and bluefield business process optimization, automation integration and implementation of new warehouse technologies. Maintaining daily operations while migrating warehouse processes into a new SAP EWM system is a challenging task that needs to be planned carefully and in collaboration with all stakeholders, from your own management, IT team, and involved business partners like SAP, IT infrastructure suppliers or automation vendors. Project preparation, coordination, realization and testing are the keys to a successful transformation of processes. Orchestrating the project effectively and efficiently is essential to ensure that business processes that depend on a fully functional warehouse are not disrupted.
Some factors that need to be considered for the SAP WM migration to SAP EWM are:
- Project management – Who does what? Can I do this in-house or do I need help from project management office (PMO) specialists?
- Deployment approach for SAP EWM – What are your priorities? Which deployment approach available is best for your business? Does your business require Basic or Advanced functionality?
- Assessment of current SAP WM processes and customization vs. standard functions available in SAP EWM (fit-to-standard assessment)
- Technical migration from SAP WM to SAP EWM – What data and settings should be migrated?
- Warehouse software, technology and automation additions, upgrades, and retirements – What stays? What changes? What will be discontinued?
- Backup and emergency plans play an integral role in a secure go-live
To assist you in planning this type of transformation, 4flow provides experts in SAP best business practices, process optimization and SAP transformation projects, as well as SAP implementation expertise. As a partner with SAP Recognized Expertise in Supply Chain in Germany, our SAP experts understand the complexity of migrating SAP WM to SAP EWM and enabling a successful go-live of such projects.
Let’s talk about how we can help you transform your warehouse operations by migrating to SAP EWM. For more information about SAP services at 4flow, contact us.