The concept behind spinning of storage location from ROD to AFS

Conceptualization: 

As many of you aware that during basic settings for SAP EWM in SAP S/4HANA, SAP recommends to have two storage location creation ROD, Received on Dock and AFS, Available for sale, connected to ERP warehouse. (Reference SAP 2494704 - SAP S/4HANA 1709: Release information and restrictions for EWM in SAP S/4HANA)

SAP quotes:

Two storage locations in one warehouse allow you more flexibility in the availability of the stock. For example, stock in storage location ROD (Received On Dock) has been received in the warehouse but has not been put away into the final bin yet and as such is not available yet for customer orders; stock in storage location AFS (Available For Sale) is stored in the final bin in the warehouse and is ready to be picked for customer orders.

Note:One storage location can technically be sufficient to handle but this blog will not explain this.

This blogs will unravel how during stock type change from EWM, automatic storage location change happens in ERP. This blog will investigate below?

• Mechanism of Storage location Swap
• Mandatory settings to make it happen.

Consider the cricket ball as ERP delivery. When you create a purchase order and corresponding inbound delivery, the ROD storage location is assigned to that. Now, once you post GR from EWM, stock is still assigned to ROD.

In SAP ERP stock always belongs to a combination of plant and storage location.That means that the warehouse needs to keep the information in any stock which plant and storage locations it belongs to.

However, EWM does not know about storage locations. The stock in EWM is handled by the LIME (Logistics Inventory Managment Engine) which knows stock types.Now, question is how during Warehouse task confirmation stock type changes from F1 to F2 with corresponding swing in ERP storage location from ROD--->AFS.

Mechanism:

Every Stock type in EWM has 3 attributes: Availability Group + Location-Independent Stock Type + Stock Role.

So, Equation is now

F1=001+FF+N and F2=002+FF+N

So, when a warehouse task is confirmed, automatic swing happens, stock type changes from F1 to F2 with corresponding ROD to AFS is swapped below coding logic in standard SAP.

The class which is called during swing is /SCWM/CL_ERP_TIMBWA in method FIND_MOVE_TYPE Finds MM-IM Movement Type Using Stock Attributes.

Now, when stock type changes from F1 to F2, an ERP movement type 411(transfer posting) is triggered which swings storage location. There is table /SCWM/ TIMBWA where is direction T( Transfer Posting)

This is logic of swinging of storage location from ROD to AFS.

Mandatory settings for Swing of Sloc

• The source and destination storage types have different availability groups.
• The availability group is mandatory in the destination storage type.
• The stock type in the source storage type does not belong to the availability group for the destination storage type.

If above conditions are met, an automatic storage location swings happens from ROD to AFS.

Hope all my SAP connections would like this.

Shailesh Mishra

PS: Special thanks to Shailesh Mishra (Senior SAP EWM Consultant at Deloitte Canada) for sharing his article