Building a better future: how SAP Extended Warehouse Management supports sustainable enterprises

  • IT
  • operations
  • SAP

Sustainability is no longer a buzzword; it's becoming a necessity for companies to maintain a competitive edge...

The tools for sustainable supply chain management

 As consumers become more environmentally conscious, companies must find ways to reduce their carbon footprint, minimise waste, and operate within a more sustainable parameter. 

It is now crucial to adopt proactive supply chain sustainability strategies, with the capability to innovate being a precursor to a successful sustainable supply chain and managerial orientation. By leveraging SAP solutions and digital transformations, your business can build sustainability into its supply chain processes. 

SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) provides businesses with advanced warehouse management capabilities, including inventory tracking, order fulfilment, and logistics planning. By using SAP EWM, your business can gain greater visibility into your supply chain activities, helping you to enable optimal and sustainable practices throughout your warehouse space by providing for reduced industrial waste and enhanced energy efficiency.

Reduced industrial waste through improved tracking

One of the key benefits of SAP EWM is that it provides real-time inventory tracking and management capabilities. This enables businesses to optimise their inventory levels, by reducing waste and enabling better management of material flows. Through real-time data on inventory levels and warehouse operations, your business is able to reduce energy consumption by effective resource allocation. An example of this is through EWM’s Wave Management, that has the capability of grouping and consolidating deliveries, so that they can be picked and packed together.

Optimising for sustainability: RFID scanners & automatic packaging planning

SAP EWM can further support your business in reducing the level of waste through the use of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) scanners, which can be executed on mobile or handheld devices, to provide for a paperless warehousing system. The solution can also diminish packaging waste, using the automatic packaging planning tool, which can be integrated alongside SAP Transport Management (TM) to help determine the most efficient packing of goods onto a pallet to optimise your cargo space based on specific criteria like the stack-ability, physical dimensions or required orientation.


Increased visibility, endless scalability

With increased visibility into your warehouse operations through real-time inventory tracking, order status updates, and logistics planning, you can be supported in making more informed decisions and respond quickly to changing market conditions. SAP EWM is a scalable solution, capable of supporting the warehouse management needs of businesses of all sizes. This makes it an ideal solution for firms that are looking to expand their operations or streamline their existing ones.

3 solutions to enhance your sustainable enterprise

We've aligned 3 key solutions to our sustainability offering that will help your business achieve its ESG goals and initiatives: 

  1. Sourcing and Procurement in S/4HANA
  2. SAP S/4HANA EWM (Extended Warehouse Management)
  3. SAP Transportation Management (TM)

These solutions enable your organisation to track and monitor operations from sourcing and procurement to production and distribution. Using SAP S/4HANA, you can gain real-time visibility into your supply chain processes, ensure continuous improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimise your processes and enforce a circular supply chain. 

Discover our solutions for sustainable supply chain management