What is Lean Warehouse Management in SAP

                                       Lean warehouse management is the process of developing warehouse operations in such a way as to bring resource consumption to a minimum without sacrificing productivity. In other words, lean warehouse management aims to ensure your team never uses more resources than they need to when completing a specific task.

Warehouse Management with Lean WM

 When we implement the Warehouse Management System (WMS), we manage goods movements and stock changes in the warehouse at storage bin level. 

 However, if we implement Lean WM , inventory management takes place solely at storage location level. The system does not update the stock data at storage bin level using the quants.

 We use Lean WM solely for processing goods receipts and goods issues. Using Lean WM, we process the warehouse movements in basically the same way as if using the Warehouse Management System: we work with deliveries, and we create transfer orders for these deliveries. These transfer orders serve as pick lists.

 We recommend that we implement Lean WM if we wish to pick deliveries in a warehouse that we are not managing using WMS.

The use of transfer orders in Lean WM provides the following advantages:

• We can reprint transfer orders at any time.

• We can split transfer orders and thus distribute the workload better among the staff in the warehouse.

• We can pass on the transfer order target data and the names of those who process transfer orders to the HR application component, where this data can be used to calculate incentive wage.

If we do no wish to update stocks in our fixed bin warehouse at storage bin level, Lean WM provides we with the option of using the advantages of warehouse management through transfer orders in the same way as warehouse management using the WMS.

Note

 If we are already using the standard WM system, we recommend that we implement Lean WM in a further warehouse where no updating of stocks at storage bin level is necessary. In this way, we ensure that the processes for warehouse management are uniform in all warehouses.

 Since Lean WM does not update stocks at storage bin level, we can display the stock quantities solely in Inventory Management (IM) and not with the stock overview function in WM. Also, we cannot process possible stock differences that occur in the warehouse using Lean WM, only using Inventory Management (MM-IM):

Prerequisites

We can only implement Lean WM in a fixed bin warehouse; random storage is not possible.

Before we can implement Lean WM, we need to make the following configuration changes in Customizing:

1. Assign a (newly defined) storage location to a warehouse number.

2. Set up at least two storage types:

 a picking storage type as the source storage type

 A shipping area as the destination storage type for deliveries