SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) has become the strategic warehouse execution platform for SAP S/4HANA environments. Despite its extensive functionality, many implementations experience operational disruption during rollout and sometimes far beyond the initial go live. Experience across pharmaceutical manufacturing, pharmaceutical distribution, retail distribution, electronics distribution and discrete manufacturing shows that most implementation challenges are not caused by the software itself, but by misalignment between warehouse operations, system configuration, and master data governance. This whitepaper presents lessons learned from multiple real-world implementations and proposes practical strategies to mitigate risk.. Author: Arno Botha