[Wilmington , USA] — 19 September 2026 — SCM Champs, a consultancy specialising in SAP supply chain execution, has set out a structured approach for connecting SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) and SAP Transportation Management (TM) so that warehouse execution and transportation planning run as one process. It is aimed at organisations that already run both systems but still coordinate day-to-day execution through spreadsheets, phone calls and email.

According to SCM Champs, the gap rarely appears as a software fault. Warehouse and transportation applications each perform as designed, but the handoff between them is often managed by people. A truck can arrive before a load is ready, a late customer change may not reach the floor, and a driver waits while picking is completed. The resulting costs typically surface as detention charges, overtime, missed cut-offs, expedited freight and service failures rather than as an alert on a dashboard.

The company identifies several recurring symptoms. Trucks arrive before shipments are staged; warehouse changes such as short picks or altered pallet counts do not reach planners quickly enough; planners work without a current view of what has been picked, packed or loaded; and staging or loading delays push departure times, delivery windows and the next collection. In many sites, experienced staff hold the process together manually, and warehouse automation runs efficiently inside the building while coordination beyond it remains manual.

SCM Champs stresses that agreement on what information must pass between the systems should come before interface design. From TM, the warehouse needs transportation planning information, freight order details, transportation-unit information where relevant, planned loading and departure times, and any changes after planning, such as a late carrier or a resequenced load. From the warehouse, TM needs delivery and shipment data including weights, volumes and pallet counts, staging and loading status, actual execution status, execution updates such as loading start, finish and departure, and shipment readiness.

Owning both products, the company notes, is not the same as running a connected process. Warehouse and transportation processes are often designed by different teams at different times, and a live interface can still exchange data at points that do not match how the operation works. Information may arrive late or in a form the other side cannot act on. Automation layers such as the Material Flow System (MFS), conveyors, automated storage and retrieval systems and robotics are usually built around throughput inside the warehouse and may not report the events transportation depends on. Exceptions and heavy custom development can further widen the gap.

The company describes more than one route to integration, selected according to the customer's landscape. Embedded EWM with TM in S/4HANA suits organisations that want a single system to maintain and upgrade, provided embedded scope covers their warehouse requirements. EWM and TM integrated across the landscape fits decentralised EWM, separate systems or multiple sites on different release cycles, where the process must be designed across system boundaries. Transportation-unit-based integration suits heavy loading, dock scheduling and yard movement, where the trailer or container is the object the warehouse loads against. Advanced Shipping and Receiving (ASR) provides an end-to-end shipping and receiving process built on the freight order rather than on warehouse-side transportation objects.

SCM Champs sets out its method in five steps: assess the current landscape, including systems, interfaces and the processes people actually follow; map the end-to-end execution flow from order through delivery, planning, staging, loading and departure; define the specific information, events and statuses that must move between EWM and TM and when each must arrive; connect warehouse automation so that MFS, conveyors and robotics support the SAP execution flow rather than run alongside it; and test real-world exceptions such as late trucks, partial loading and quantity changes after planning.

The company also points to questions organisations should resolve internally before engaging a partner: whether EWM and TM are designed as one end-to-end flow or as two flows joined by an interface; which warehouse events should update transportation execution, and how quickly each must arrive; whether the automation layer is inside the integration design or outside it; where standard SAP capability is used and why each custom development exists; what happens when warehouse execution changes after transportation planning is complete, and who decides in which system; and who owns exception handling across the two functions.

"Treating warehouse and transportation as two separate systems is how the gap appears in the first place," a spokesperson for SCM Champs said. "The objective is connected execution, where each change in one step is visible to the others while there is still time to act on it, not simply data moving between two systems."

The company defines connected execution as one flow in which transportation planning informs warehouse readiness, staging, loading and departure, with execution status feeding back to planning. Depending on the starting point, it says a better-connected flow can support closer coordination between teams, less manual intervention, clearer visibility of ready shipments, fewer avoidable delays, more consistent execution across shifts and sites, and improved return on existing automation.

SCM Champs works in SAP supply chain execution, focusing on SAP EWM, SAP TM and the point where the two meet, including integration, implementation, migration, configuration and ongoing support, as well as warehouse automation and the surrounding systems. The company offers an EWM–TM integration assessment that reviews an organisation's current EWM, TM, warehouse automation and integration flows and identifies where warehouse and transportation execution fall out of sync.