Warehouse management: How to enhance SAP EWM performance

16. July 2024

8 Minutes

An introduction to SAP EWM

SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) is renowned for its robust capabilities in managing end-to-end warehouse processes, from goods receipt to shipping. Despite its strengths, companies sometimes encounter performance issues in their production systems, which do not appear during quality or test phases. This blog explores the causes of these performance issues and provides actionable steps to improve SAP EWM performance.

The key points of the blog

What are the main reasons for SAP EWM performance issues?

Performance issues in SAP EWM can stem from various sources, including application layer, configuration, database, or server side-effects. Physical hardware can also cause problems but will not be discussed in this blog.

Generally, the performance issues often go unnoticed during testing or development cycles and only surface in live production environments due to combinations of real transaction data that stress the system resources.

Some of these issues are inherent to the system but can be avoided through careful planning and configuration in the design phase. Some cannot be avoided due to the physical limitations of the overall SAP EWM set-up, and some cannot be traced during testing and only emerge in post-production after go-live.

When designing the set-up of SAP EWM, the standard SAP operations guide is a one-stop tool that provides valuable design considerations for SAP EWM hardware sizing. For more details, please view the SAP Extended Warehouse Management Operations Guide.

SAP EWM is renowned for its robust capabilities in managing end-to-end warehouse processes. Enhancing 4 key layers can take the warehouse management to the next level.

What are the main types of performance issues of SAP EWM?

To effectively diagnose and resolve performance issues in SAP EWM, it’s crucial to categorise them into four main areas. Each category allows for precise analysis and targeted problem-solving, ensuring the overall performance of SAP EWM and, therefore, of the operator is maintained.

The four layers are:

Transaction Layer
Database Layer
ABAP Layer
Configuration Layer

In the following chapters we will have a closer look into each individual area to see the areas of impact and possible directions to resolve it.

Ways for improving the performance of SAP EWM

Transaction optimisation

If you notice slow response times for small and large transactions or high consumption of your system resources, the SAP Note 1423066 on the optimisation of the performance in SAP EWM provides useful guidance to solve the issues:

Optimise response times in (radio frequency) RF transactions
For measuring RF performance, refer to the SAP Note 1690850
Enhance the response times of “large” desktop transactions and background processing
Use generic optimisation options within the EWM system to improve response times and the consumption of system resources
Implement best practices for high-throughput processes for storage sections as outlined in SAP Note 1896480.
Make use of generic optimisations within technology components

HANA database optimisation

Database-related performance issues often arise from table interlocking during updates. Some of these issues cannot be avoided due to synchronous updates. The other issues you can address by:

Performing asynchronous updates with parallel processing where possible
Following SAPs Best Practices for HANA DB Performance and Sizing

ABAP Layer

Custom code improvement

The SAP ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC) is a central quality assurance tool that enables users to perform static functional, performance, and security checks, as well as ABAP Unit tests for custom ABAP code. It ensures smooth migrations and consistent check results across the company. Utilise the ABAB Test Cockpit (ATC) as a standard procedure to deploy custom codes to production. Additionally, tools like ST12 and ST05 (SAT) can trace custom code execution and identify bottlenecks. You can find an overview of the different checks available in the ATC in the SAP blog on the ABAP test cockpit checks for SAP EWM.

Configuration layer

Queue delays / performance issues

Queue delays without errors could indicate transaction locking. In that case, slow system performance could hold the queue in a sequence to update SAP ECC causing such delays. However, when system performance is high, you may not notice any delays.

Check the qRFC Administration for resource allocation. It is possible that the assigned resources (work processes) are not sufficient, which can lead to performance issues in other areas like PPF printing.

In case of such queue delays, also analyse whether the system is accessing the table ARFCRSTATE repeatedly. If yes, you can activate QRFC trace and analyse the response time during debugging.

Post goods issue (PGI) performance issues

Activate the ABAP trace to determine whether this table /lime/nquan & /LIME/NTREE consumes most of the memory/time. Send the trace results for both the slow performance and the best performance for comparison purposes.

If the issue appears again, you can find information on what to do next in the SAP Note 2594894

Hardware Limitations

Proper hardware sizing is an important task in the initial phases of projects. This approach, along with customer peak load performance data, can be used to evaluate the hardware’s performance under peak loads. Ensure that realistic production data is used for testing.

The SAP Note 85524 provides valuable guidelines on the hardware sizing approach and its implementation.