Rocket SAP supply chain news and blog

Achieve Project Success with SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain Management & EWM

Written by Caroline Macleod | February 16,2021

SAP S/4HANA provides businesses with the opportunity to simplify their SAP supply chain landscape by including Transportation Management (TM) and Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) within a single S/4HANA system.

For any product, asset or supply chain intensive business, the move to S/4HANA presents a wealth of opportunity for improvement, however planning and sequencing this transition (if done correctly) can significantly reduce the change impact on supply chain operations and avoid painful service level impacts.

The early stages of defining the right approach and architecture of any SAP S/4HANA transformation journey are a critical foundation to ensure S/4HANA project success.

Move forward with pricing confidence

If you have selected S/4HANA 'Basic' Embedded EWM or 'Advanced' Embedded EWM as your SAP Warehouse Management System of choice, then you may be ready to experience a new way of accessing credible, transparent costing, sizing and timeline estimations for your SAP digital supply chain transformation project.

Reduce complexity in early project phases with transparent decision making insights

You’ve completed a successful SAP Warehouse Management System (WMS) business case; you have successfully aligned this to your business strategy and gone through the complex process of engaging key stakeholders. Are you ready to bring more complexity into your business at this stage?

Maybe you’re trying to get a rough idea of pricing and SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) implementation timeline, but not yet ready to engage an SAP Partner.

For many businesses not yet ready to engage with an SAP partner or reach out to the SAP ecosystem, the “window shopping phase” of building a rough idea of price and example SAP EWM implementation timeline is where retaining control is key to ensuring project success.

Support your SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) business case by creating a substantiated budget, timeline, and resourcing plan in under 10 minutes

Gaining a rough order of magnitude

Shaping up an SAP Digital Supply Chain project or WMS implementation requires a rough idea of size and shape of the WMS platform. This step helps provide a broad understanding of what the project implementation may look like.

When you reach out to external partners to gain a rough order of magnitude for the project, you'll often receive a response such as; 'it depends on several factors'.

If achieving total project success is the goal, the question asked should be:

“Can you give me a rough order of magnitude, show me how it's broken down and worked out, explain how it contributes to internal and external costs (and what is influencing that outcome) and show me how the costs were achieved?”

You should have the ability to ask all of this without entering into a sales conversation.

Achieve total control and transparency

As part of our drive to dramatically improve provision of professional services and the customer experience, we have now launched the Rocket Project Sizing & Budgeting Calculator for SAP EWM. The tool does this in a way that starts to demonstrate the size and structure of the project whilst following our recommended and proven approach. We wanted to give customers a way to gain a little more than a ROM themselves, whilst being guided through the key WMS criteria that have a significant influence on the shape, size, budget and timeline of a project, whilst providing a non-pressurised environment, effectively removing the sales conversation.

A client may go from a rough order of magnitude of 12 months to £1million, but organisations may find this lacking granularity, making it difficult to understand the budget and get a handle on how they can influence that budget.

The calculator will enable unlimited iterations and can facilitate discussions around scope versus budget before conversations are taken outside the organisation.

It will also provide help around resourcing, for example; what do they need from a partner (duplicating resourcing – can you perhaps find an alternative or leave out entirely?). It’s very hard to identify additional costs in this area and the detailed analysis will help provide further clarity around resourcing from each party, external and internal partners.

What is the tool?

If you are looking to create a business case supported by substantiated budget, costs and resourcing plans for an SAP DSC platform (in this case SAP EWM), then the Rocket Project Sizing & Budgeting tool for SAP EWM will allow you to carry out a quick and structured high level requirements assessment, helping you rate the key aspects of your scope that our experience shows has significant impact on timeline and budget.



You can then view your results in an easy-to-understand way, in real-time, with online guidance to assist you throughout. We have reduced this exercise from weeks down to minutes, helping many of our customers avoid the need for time consuming and costly RFI processes to simply form an indicative budget.

S/4HANA supply chain management for Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) project success IS Rocket Science!

Rockets S/4HANA approach avoids big-bang changes and allows site-by-site upgrades to S/4HANA digital supply chain solutions ahead of the back-office migration, giving you more control and stability to your business critical operations, earlier access to improvements and a simplified S/4 ERP transition with greater opportunity to standardise back office processes and even move to S/4 HANA Cloud for lower total cost.

Learn how Rocket helped Marston's generate a clear transformation road map from SAP ECC to SAP S/4 HANA, plus SAP Digital Supply Chain.

Part of the Rocket Digital Command Centre Toolset 

Increasing project success rates by transforming customer decision making with fast visual insights throughout the project lifecycle.