When to introduce Storage Unit into a warehouse business

Question

Hi all,
I am new in storage unit and I did read up a couple website about the storage unit and know how it work.
However, I am wondering if you can share your experience with regards to following questions.
In what kind of warehouse operation setting best suit to use SAP storage unit functionality? Does the warehouse business process require to meet some basic pre-requisites before a storage unit process of SAP is consider feasible and not overkill or will provide value added to the whole warehouse operation?
Is there any concern or remification of introducing SAP SU into a warehouse operation (both from system and business perspective). In another word, impact to other module as a result of SU.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Regards,
Daniel

Answer 1

Hello Daniel, there are a number of reasons and scenarios for introduction of storage units.
I assume you want to use / are using - RF devices for WM...
From the aspect of warehouse operations if your products don't have printed material bar codes, then you would need to print them at some point in order to be able to scan your materials during transfer order confirmation. When you have batch management too, in bulk storage types everything gets more complicated since if you don't have storage unit management, and have batch managed materials, you also need to scan batch number in addition to scanning your material bar code. Ok, now you need to have that batch number bar-coded too. This gets a bit tricky, scanning two bar codes, printing 2 bar codes... Then why not introduce storage unit management and kill a couple of flies with one hit?
What storage unit does, is keep all the info stored in itself.
SU keeps track of material inside it, batch number, etc. So when you are picking from bulk storage type, by simply scanning SU you want to pick, you are actually specifying all the info from that SU, like material, batch, etc.
Someone will argue that material bar-code isn't mandatory to be scanned and yes it can be switched off, but it leaves you with a lot of room for mistakes, so if you don't have SU management, you need to scan the material + batch.
Also, it is easier to perform physical inventory with RF and storage unit managed warehouse. If you are having batch management that is.
From business point of view first we can think of traceability (not in the meaning of standard batch traceability) => like having the information of which exact pallet went to which customer.
When you scan storage unit for picking to customer 1234, you will have the information where did the exact pallet go, if you need that kind of info.
You can also have some sort of functionality like that without SU management, because you can actually store more information in one bar code, like scanning once and having all the info in one long number (by parsing the number you can assign that info to the appropriate fields in RF transactions).
And that's one good approach too if you don't want storage unit management but want to scan only once, but this requires some modifications to RF programs to be able to parse the scanned data into multiple data fields. Storage unit does something like that with just a bit of customizing.
Actually there are a lot of good things SU introduces in your warehouse, but sometimes it is overkill indeed, if you don't really need it then don't implement it, sometimes things are good to be kept simple, although I seem to thing about SU management to be the simplest way of operating WH.
If you need any further clarification or question about SU, feel free...
Regards,
Mihailo