The new SAP EWM release extended the options for planning packing for shipping by means of package building. What is it? Let us take a closer look.

In fact this is an additional packing planning algorithm for the outbound process, which SAP carried over from SAP TM. Previously EWM had the SAP1 algorithm profile, which contained a hard-coded packing planning algorithm with no configuration options and worked by default. Now a new profile has been added – SAP2 – which can be tuned to some extent in SPRO:

The SAP1 algorithm looks like this:

The SAP2 algorithm looks like this:

The additional settings for the SAP2 algorithm are located in SPRO under «Extended Warehouse Management» - «Goods Issue Process» - «Packing Planning» - «Package Building» - «Define Package Building Profile».

Note: this setting is not recorded in a transport request, it has to be maintained directly in the target system.

The following options are available:

I will give a more detailed, human-readable description of the algorithm and of what these fields do in a separate article, because all of this is buried in several thousand lines of code and there is no way to make sense of it without debugging.

The source code of the algorithms can be found in the implementations of the BAdI /SCWM/EX_CAP_ALGORITHM:

• SAP1 in the implementation /SCWM/EI_CAP_MIN_HUS
• SAP2 in the implementation /SCWM/EI_CAP_PB_TM

In the settings of transaction «/SCWM/CAP_PB_PKG_ASS - Assign Packaging to Products» you define the assignment of a product to packages:

And in transaction «/SCWM/CAPPDET - Determine Algorithm Profiles for Packing Planning» you define how the algorithm profile is selected:

The whole Package Building functionality lives in the package /SCMB/PB_ENGINE:

You can also configure a product orientation profile in order to plan the planned handling units even more efficiently. At the time of writing, the product orientation functionality is only available after implementing the note: 

2580233 - Product Orientation Profile

You can also read the description of Package Building in the SAP note: 

2683464 - Package Builder: A Basic Introduction to Package Building

Bottom line: for now I cannot say much about this feature, since I never worked with it in SAP TM and have not dug into it in EWM yet.