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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