Project and Portfolio Management

Main Process

 

Project Structuring

The central structures in Project System are work breakdown structures (WBS) and networks, with their attendant activities and milestones. With cProjects you can structure a project using phases, tasks, checklists, and checklist items. Use versions to simulate project changes or take snap-shots of the actual project data. 

Document Management

Project System is fully integrated into the document management system of SAP PLM Life-Cycle Data Management. Assigning documents is supported by all DMS functions (that is, versioning and vaulting). You can view the originals of assigned document masters and maintain them directly in the project builder. You can search for project documents using various search engines and publish them for external access on the Internet. cProjects additionally supports a built-in document repository and allows document collaboration via cFolders.

Costs

You can plan costs entering overall values for WBS elements or for example using detailed planning or easy cost planning. You can also make use of the network calculation of internal and external work, services, and procurement planned in activities that are automatically calculated. A cProject can be mapped to internal orders or WBS elements to plan costs based on resource staffings and cost rates.

Revenues

The billing plan is either automatically updated by the sales order or planned manually in the project and includes dates on which payment requests or invoices affecting sales are sent to customers. Milestones can be used to trigger the billing procedure. You can also benefit from sales pricing and resource-related billing.

Budget

Budget availability controls all expenditures during the execution phase. For projects budget can be distributed top-down to individual WBS elements. Additionally, the original budget can be broken down into smaller packages of released budgets to allow an even more accurate availability control.

Scheduling Functions

The system calculates the dates for an entire project or a portion of the project with all associated project objects when you select the scheduling function. Scheduling is carried out forwards and backwards according to the relationships between activities. Constraints are taken into account, earliest and latest dates are calculated, and floats are determined. cProjects supports both bottom-up and top-down scheduling. Use a Gantt chart to analyze or change dates.

Assigning resources to work that has to be done in the project including resource search. After the project has been released this process covers time confirmation on projects.

Confirmation

Enables you to confirm actual time and costs for your project. The times you enter become the actual times and costs for the project. Amongst others the Cross Application Time Sheet (CATS) can be used to confirm times for network or cProjects activities. Full change and cancellation handling are also provided. 

Project-Oriented Procurement/Production

The procurement of external resources and services can be triggered in projects using network activities or Executions Services of Easy Cost Planning. Using the assignment of material components to network activities, you determine the assemblies and raw materials that must be reserved or ordered for a project and trigger procurement using MRP or purchasing. Apart from manual assignment options you can assign material also using the BOM-PS, the Open Catalog, or IPPE interface. With ProMan project oriented procurement information from, for example, project system, purchasing, production or inventory management can be accessed and processed together. cProjects also supports resource and material procurement via SAP SRM.

Claim Management

Processes any project-relevant information such as variances or claims from third parties. Additional costs that might incur because of claims can be estimated in claim management and integrated in project cost planning.

Payments

During execution, payment of relevant postings -- through integration of other SAP solutions -- feeds project cash management and provides the most accurate information possible on incoming and outgoing payments.

Project Progress

Progress analysis/earned value analysis is the tool to determine planned and actual project progress values. It obtains information on the state of projects and how they are developing. Using the Progress Analysis Workbench you can update progress data of multipple project objects simultaneously in one screen and benefit from import/export to Microsoft Excel. Milestone trend analysis displays the dates of the relevant milestones in a project at different report dates.

Progress Tracking

Enables you to closely monitor the progress of network components in the project system and purchase orders in materials management.

Phase Approvals

Protect phase approvals in cProjects by a structured approval process including decision makers named by the project manager and digitally signed approval documents.

Procurement Process

Consolidate procurement process with ProMan information from a variety of applications in a structured and individual overview, which can be configured by the user. You have access to data from the project system, purchasing, material requirements planning, production, and inventory management.

Project Reporting

The Project Information System is a flexible, comprehensive information system you can use to monitor and control your project data. You can evaluate individual projects, partial projects, or multiple projects. Includes overview reports and reports offering various degrees of detail. Is designed to meet the needs of both project management and ordinary project personnel. Predefined InfoCubes are available for the SAP Business Information Warehouse from PS and cProjects.

In addition cProjects supports built- evaluations, flexible treshhold values and dashboards.

Project Costing

Benefit from cost planning in various degrees of detail. Automatic cost calculation can be used based on prices and quantity structures. From cProjects use Easy Cost Planning to create costings based on the current project plan. Based on the planned costs you can use the sales pricing to calculate the sales price for a product or service and create quotations. Use funds management by means of hierarchical budget allocations. Availability control enables you to control costs actively by issuing warnings and error messages when costs are incurred.

Revenues

Use manual revenue planning or automatic update of revenue plan values from project system or sales document billing plans. Milestone dates can be used to update dates in biling plans automatically and trigger the billing procedure. With resource-related billing you can create billing request for work done, materials used, and other costs incurred in customer projects. Easy Cost Planning can be used to plan revenues based on cProjects data.

Integrated Planning and Tracking

Detailed integration brings SAP ERP Financials capabilities to the project world, including budgeting, cost planning, cash management and actual costs confirmations and commitments from various sources such as Controlling, Financial Accounting, Production Planning and Control, or Materials Management.

Settle Financial Data

Perform various allocations and period-end closing activities and finally, transfer costs and revenues to Financial Accounting (FI) , Asset Accounting (AA), Profitability and Sales Analysis (CO-PA), or Controlling (CO) for example.

Portfolio Integration

Evaluate SAP xApp RPM for portfolio wide project budgeting and cost and revenue forecasts.

NPDI is the process of defining the product strategy, managing the program, gathering requirements, developing the product, sourcing for suppliers involved and managing the ramp-up.

The business process "development collaboration" allows you to optimize a cross-enterprise product development with internal and external teams including the sourcing of complex product components. This is reached among other things by a consistent central storage of all relevant data during the entire collaboration process and a secure integration of external partners and suppliers.