Performance issues
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.
Challenges
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.
4 types of issues
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:
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.
Solutions
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:
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:
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
Understanding the layers
Addressing SAP EWM performance issues requires a thorough understanding of the system’s various layers and their interactions. By following the outlined strategies, you can significantly enhance your warehouse management efficiency. If you need further assistance in optimising your SAP EWM, contact KPS for expert support (Link to contact form on the blog page). Visit our supply chain management page for more details on our services.
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