Project Resource Planning 

Purpose

Having the right employees at the right place at the right time is one of the central requirements of today’s human resource management.

Project Resource Planningprovides a planning tool for you to optimize your human resource deployment.

The system supports you in planning your projects and staffing the projects with suitable and available resources.Project Resource Planning offers a resource search that finds resources according to their qualifications, organizational assignment, project experience, and availability.

You can store resources as favorites in the system or reserve them for the project. Once you have a definitive contract for the project, you can then book the resources. This means that you can conclude your project planning at an early stage and start the project.

 

Prerequisites

You have installed and configured the minimum release of the following systems and applications:

·        SAP CRM 4.0 (including cProjects Suite 3.00 and WFM Core 100)

·        SAP BW 3.2

·        MS Exchange 2000 or Lotus Domino 5.0

 

Preconfigured business processes are available in the SAP Library under SAP Best Practices ® Professional Services.  You can order this from the SAP Software Catalog in the SAP Service Marketplace by following the Internet address service.sap.com.

 

Process Flow

 

       1.      The project lead creates project roles for a particular validity period with the planned required capacity (see Creating Project Roles).

       2.      The project lead assigns tasks to the project roles. The project lead can restrict the time of the assignment and specify the work to be assigned to the role (see Assigning Tasks/Project Roles).

       3.      The resource manager searches for a suitable and available resource for each project role. The resource manager can enter additional search criteria as well as the qualification requirements from the tasks: qualifications, organizational assignment, project experience, and availability (see Resource Search).

       4.      The system searches for suitable and available resources (see Running a Search).

       5.      The system displays the search result in order of availability and suitability (see Search Result).

       6.      The resource manager checks the search result. He or she can view the profile matchup of the person's qualifications and the qualification requirements and additional information about the resource, such as the projects the resource has already worked on.

       7.      The resource manager saves a resource as a favorite (see Storing Resources as Favorites).

       8.      The resource manager gets the resource's agreement and the manager's approval that the resource can be used for the project.

       9.      To notify the resource and his or her manager of the project, the resource manager can send an e-mail containing automatically inserted information about the project directly from the application (see Notifying a Selected Resource by E-Mail).

   10.      Once the resource manager has the manager's approval and the resource's agreement, he or she assigns the resource from the favorites directly to the project (see Staffing Project Roles with Resources).

   11.      The project lead specifies the framework for agreeing appointments by sending groupware tasks. This is first of all a capacity planning that results from the staffing of a project role by a resource. This assignment may be for example "10 days in May" (see Groupware Integration and Creating a Groupware Task).

   12.      The system creates groupware tasks and sends them to the resource.

   13.      The resource then creates concrete appointments from the tasks.

   14.      The project lead can also send the resource concrete appointments via the groupware (see Creating a Groupware Appointment).

   15.      The system creates the appointments in the resource's groupware.

   16.      The resource organizes additional appointments with the customer and creates them in the calendar.

   17.      The system periodically updates the resources' availability so that the current availability is always referenced in the resource search.

   18.      The BW system creates capacity utilization reports for each resource.

   19.      cProjects 3.1 provides you with a multiple level staffing process. Additional information is available in the SAP Library under mySAP Business Suite ® SAP Customer Relationship Management ® CRM Enterprise ® Enterprise Service ® Professional Services Project Management ® Collaboration Projects (cProjects).