Monday, October 29, 2018 12:14 PM

Picking unit: SD WM HU Interface

September 8, 2017 | 1,663 Views |
Automatic delivery items generation for packaging materials of
picking unit: SD WM HU Interface
shailesh mishra
Purpose:
The idea of writing this blog goes back to year 2014 during one of my SAP implementation in India
where there was requirement to have Automatic packaging items generation at time of outbound
delivery. without maintaining Predefined packaging instruction and packaging condition records
which in short is termed as Automatic packing. This concept of Automatic generation of packaging
materials as delivery item is completely different than automatic packing.
Overview:
There are gamut of packaging bottlenecks which business faces and requirement is to have an easy
SAP standard solution to cater their needs.
I am listing some of my experience during my implementation projects or during my manufacturing
days which I used to witness.
1) Business conducts its shipping process by packing the Items into a Handling unit and ship them out.
The shipping Item is packed with a Drum or Cylinder which shipper wants as a returnable
item. Business needs to track the each drum or each cylinder.
2) In most of the manufacturing industry, packaging items are procured and consumed against Cost
centers, kind of indirect purchasing where the Inventory control visibility is completely lost here.
3) Some manufacturing business has requirement to charge or bill the Packaging material to the
customer because Product Engineering has done the product costing considering Main FG+ AUXILIARY
Packaging separately considering valuated Packaging material cost. They need to have 2 legs in
delivery, first leg will be Finished product and second leg will be of packaging materials but it should
trigger automatically.
4) The next requirement is to pick an Available packaging material which is in stock. A product can be
packed into 10 different kinds of packaging based on availability and that control needs to be
triggered at time of outbound delivery Creation, a kind of Variant Packaging.
Reconciling all the above points, I am writing this blog to conduct a scenario having the below
characteristics.
1. Warehouse is WM Managed.( Plant-WM-Sloc)
2. Warehouse Storage type is Storage unit managed.
3. Warehouse is Handling unit managed.( Picking and Putaway storage location is HU-WM managed)
So, from this 4 blocker daigram, an interoperability can be drawn how this concept can help client in
multi ways

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Business Process:
So with one SAP standard functionality of ”Generation of delivery items for Packaging materials of
Picking Unit” 4 different business requirement can be mapped.

So, when ever I conduct outbound delivery and at stage of PGI, my Packaging material should be
defaulted in Outbound delivery and the quantity to be consumed will be purely on business decision.
Lets start the process.
1. Create sales order
2. Create outbound delivery
3. Create Transfer Order
4. Confirm transfer order
5. PGI the delivery

Since there are complexity in HU-WM managed location as we cannot conduct packing directly in
outbound delivery, below flow chart will explain contours of this process.

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Configuration required.
1. You need to configure Packaging material group, packaging material type and a corresponding
assignment of Packaging material types to packaging material Group. My Packaging material group
is 0002 and packaging material type is 1000.

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If you look into the material master of Packaging material, i have done settings in packaging material
type to pick Plant. Plant determination is very important and Generate delivery items settings as
described below.

2) The required delivery type of sales order and the item category of delivery needs to determined
and below setting needs to be done
SO type is ZGCS, Item category group is ZGCS, and item category is ZGCS.
Setting can be found in 0VLK for delivery type. PACK is for packing and CHSP is for batch split as my
main FG is batch managed.

Item category determination

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3) I created a Sales order 2000001616,order type ZGCS and Item category of packaging materials is
ZGCS as highlighted

4) Created an Outbound delivery as below. Delivery has only one leg as FG.

5) Create a Picking order. I picked a required storage unit manually. I didnt let the system to pick the
storage unit via the picking strategy of storage type 801.

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6) Since my Picking requirement is only 1(HU=1), however, the storaGE UNIT=4, hence we need to
create a pick HU. Mention the required packaging materials which needs to be picked from storage
unit.

7) If we look into the picked Storage unit 3000001070, it is a nested HU.

8) Now, confirm the Transfer order to Pack the required Picking Unit(or Pick HU). Now, destination
HU becomes the Pick HU and the bin number will be outbound delivery number.( Dynamic bin setting
for WM movement type 601)
And we will pick one HU from Nested HU available in storage unit. So, handling unit 8006535932
packaging material 7xxxxx3 will now be packed in delivery

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9) Lets check our original outbound delivery now.
Packaging material 70011113 automatically generated in delivery. Delivery has 2 legs, 1 leg is Main
FGand 2nd leg is Packaging material.

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The packaging material is assigned with handling unit as highlighted.

The whole process has been very well explained in below SAP KBAs.
2323180 – Delivery items for packaging materials of picking
unit
831204 – Delivery items for packaging materials

Focus to be made on below diagram to obtain this requirement. If all the 4 configuration are correctly
met, packaging material will be referenced in outbound delivery automatically.

So, once PGI is done, billing document will be generated and it would encapsulate the FG cost
+Packaging material cost. So, in this way, we can bill packaging material to customer in delivery.

RETURNABLE PACKAGING Logistics cycle

In case of packaging material which is returnable, we need to conduct below configuration and steps
1. Make the returnable packaging material type as LEIH
2. In OMS2, tick only the qty column not value.,

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 2. In OMS2, tick only the qty column not value.,
3. The item category of packaging materials will be TAL and all above configuration needs to done.
4. We can think to serialize the packaging materials for easy traceability as Handling unit endorses
serialization of items
A look into the TAL item category, item category TAL is used for returnable packaging items, it is non
relevant to billing and you can think of assigning a special stock indicator for stock differentiation.

I would try to write a separate blog on Returnable packaging logistics in Handling unit managed
warehouse to encapsulate the Inbound and outbound process comprehensively.

I would like to express special thanks to Mr. Juergen Pitz who found the error as I was continuously
failing to complete this cycle. You can view our discussion here.
https://answers.sap.com/questions/299408/generate-delivery-items-for-packaging-materials-in.html
Here the topic ends. I would wait for readers message if any corrections are required.

In the next blog I will write on Returnable Handling unit in Transportation chain( LE WM SHP TRA). I
found below SAP KBA which talks about how handling units can be used in transportation as
returnable items

From <https://blogs.sap.com/2017/09/08/automatic-delivery-items-generation-for-packaging-materials-of-picking-unit-sd-wm-
hu-interface/>

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