Project planning

This article is to describe the project planning include cost planning, date planning and resource planning

Cost planning

• SAP provides several types of costs planning:
•  Hierarchical planning (manual costs planning): plan costs against WBS
•  Network costing: costs calculated based on material, work center, working hours, activity types…
•  Cost element planning
•  Easy cost planning

Hierarchical planning: T-code CJ40

The configuration for hierarchical costs planning is in the costs planning profile:

The planning profile is configured in SPRO and put at the project definition.

Network costing:

Network costing is normally done automatically by calculating material used in network, working hours, work center, activity type…

Planned costs can also come from the external activities, service activities and cost activities.

In order to use network costing, we need to maintain the costing sheet and costing variant in the configuration (SPRO). These parameters are put at the Network header:

Cost element planning – T-code CJR2

Easy cost planning:

Easy cost planning is like a mix of hierarchical and cost element planning. To use easy cost planning, we need to define a structure to plan costs. Users will based on the structure to enter the cost estimate

T-code: CJ20N

Resource planning:

In project we can use work center to plan human/machine resources that involve in the activities.

By using the work center we can also plan the costs and capacity based on the work center parameters.

Date planning

Date planning can be done at WBS element, or at Network activities.

Date planning by WBS element

At the tab “Dates” we can enter the Basic dates, Forecast dates and Actual dates.

Basic dates are for planning purpose. Forecast dates are for information & report purpose. We enter the actual dates when the WBS actual start or finish.

The date planning at WBS element is defined by the profile that set at the project definition level:

Basically we can plan dates at WBS element by the following methods: top-down, bottom-up, open planning and strict bottom-up.

Date planning at Network activities

Each network contains a set of activities. Each activity has the start & finish date, and they link to each other by the relationship: Start-Start, Start-Finish, Finish-Finish, Finish-Start.

The planning parameters are maintained at the Network header:

The planning parameters include:

• Planning type: Basic dates or forecast dates?
•  Scheduling type: Backwards, Forwards…
•  Reduction indicator: Reduction or not?
• Schedule automatically or not?
•  Capacity requirements include in the scheduling or not?
• Break time includes in the scheduling or not?

     After cost planning, we release the project and start running it with actual data.

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Project creation

Requirement of creating a project comes from 2 main sources:

•  Inside of company -> create R&D project, or Investment project…
• Outside of company -> create customer project - automatically from sales order (assembly processing), or manually and then link to sales order (optional)

Project can be created from template, or manually.

Template:

There are 2 templates can be used for project creation: standard WBS and standard Network.

Standard WBS – T-code CJ91

Create Project definition first:

Create standard WBS structure:

Then save standard WBS

Standard Network – T-code CN01

First enter information for Std Network header:

Then create activities under this Network

Enter Work center, Working hours, activity type…. Then save the Std Network.

Enter the std WBS element to the activity in case we want to create this activity under one WBS element.

Create project from template

T-code: CJ20N

Enter standard project:

  è New project is generated as the templates:

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A common project life cycle and basic terms in PS module

This article is to describe the common project life cycle and explain the terms & common process steps in SAP PS.

Major functionalities of SAP PS:

• To map the real project to the SAP system by means of WBS element, Network, Activity…

• To plan project in terms of costs, time, resource

• To control budget for project

• To manage the execution, or the project running, to ensure the project run smoothly as plan

• There are many kinds of report that can be used at each phase of a project to see the plan, actual and comparison.

Below is a common project life cycle in SAP PS:

Details:

•      Requirement: there are 2 major kinds of requirement and they lead to 2 major kinds of project: internal and external.

• If the requirement comes from inside company, we create an internal project. It might be a development project, an R&D project, or an Investment project… This kind of project doesn’t have revenue.
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• If the requirement comes from outside company, we create a customer project. It might be a construction project, or a production project, to build up products for customer. This kind of project has revenue and the involvement of SD module (project might be created from Sales order, and the billing might be linked between PS & SD).
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•         Project creation: the project creation is to build an appropriate structure of project by means of WBS element, network, activity, milestone, material…

•          Project planning: to plan costs, time (begin, end, relationship, duration…), resource (which activity will be performed  at which work center)

•          Project budgeting: to plan budget for project. The budget then will be used to control. System will give warning, or not allow any transaction that lead to the excess of the project budget.

•          Project execution: the project execution phase, we might do the procurement for project (integration with MM module), production for project (integration with PP module), costs booking (integration with CO module) and confirmation of network activity (confirm the plan data – that the work has completed).

•          Period-end closing: at the period-end we need to settle the costs to appropriate objects (cost center, asset under construction…). Result analysis and several reports might be run to compare the plan/actual and to forecast/adjust.

•          After finish the project (both logistic and financial aspect) we set the project status to “Close”.

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