Activity Area
Activity Area is a new concept in EWM, it does not exist in WM.
The Activity Areas are logical groupings of bins focused on the activities that can
be taken on those bins. For instance, these activities can be Picking, Putaway, Physical
Inventory, …
The purpose of Activity Areas is to only take into account the bins assigned to them in these
activities.
The main two functions in which they can be used are:
1. To determine the Warehouse Order Creation Rule
So, based on the activity, only the set of bins assigned to that activity will be
chosen as source or destination of the Warehouse Tasks to be assigned to the
Warehouse Order.
2. To determine which Warehouse Tasks to include in a Queue
In the same way, if we want to create a specific Queue for an activity (Picking, Putaway,
…), we can use the Activity Area to restrict Warehouse Tasks to include in it
based on their source or destination bins.
Apart from that, it is worth noting that it is possible to define Activity Areas which
contain bins from different Storage Types.
Finally, in the Activity Areas we can mantain the Sort Sequence, where we can specify how
the selection of the bins assigned to an Activity Area must be done.
CUSTOMIZING OF ACTIVITY AREAS IN S4 HANA
EWM
The menu option for customizing Activity Areas in EWM is the following:
SAP Customizing Implementation Guide -> SCM Extended Warehouse Management -> Extended
Warehouse Management -> Master Data -> Activity Areas
1. DEFINE ACTIVITIES
SAP Customizing Implementation Guide -> SCM Extended Warehouse Management -> Extended
Warehouse Management -> Master Data -> Activity Areas -> Activities -> Define Activities for
Activity Areas
First of all, we need to define the different activities we want to use.
Some of them are provided by SAP by default, but we can change them or create more
if necessary.
It is possible to group them with the Special Activity Category Indicator.
2. DEFINE ACTIVITY AREAS
SAP Customizing Implementation Guide -> SCM Extended Warehouse Management -> Extended
Warehouse Management -> Master Data -> Activity Areas -> Define Activity Area
In this step, we define the different Activity Areas themselves.
3. ASSIGN STORAGE BINS TO ACTIVITY AREAS
SAP Customizing Implementation Guide -> SCM Extended Warehouse Management -> Extended
Warehouse Management -> Master Data -> Activity Areas -> Assign Storage Bins to Activity
Areas
In this customizing point, we will assign the Storage Bins we want to consider for each
Activity Area.
First of all, we can assign the Sort Sequence, which will indicate the system how to
prioritize the use of these bins.
Then we will enter the Storage Type from which these bins will be selected.
And finally, we will define the specific bins entering the start and end of the Aisles,
Stacks and Levels where they are located.
We can also select them by their Section.
The placement of the bins (Aisle, Stack, Level and Section) are maintained individually
in each Bin. They give us the exact location of each of them.
3. DEFINE SORT SEQUENCE FOR ACTIVITY AREA
SAP Customizing Implementation Guide -> SCM Extended Warehouse Management -> Extended
Warehouse Management -> Master Data -> Activity Areas -> Define Sort Sequence for Activity
Area
Finally, in this step, we will define the Sort Sequence assigned to each Activity Area.
In fact, this step must be set up in advance to the previous one.
As we can see, in it we can configure, the prioritization at the time of selecting the
different bins of one Activity Area.
