Project Summarization (SAP Library - Project Information System)

Project Summarization

Purpose

You can use this component to combine a number of projects, internal orders, and production orders with characteristics in coming, thereby achieving more efficient cost accounting over them. This makes for clearer cost analysis at higher levels.

Implementation Considerations

Project summarization is effected using master data fields. The advantage of this is that you can execute the inheritance run for master data fields separately from the actual summarization run. This significantly improves system performance.

If you were using summarization before Release 4.5, your projects are summarized by classification. We recommend that you convert to summarization by master data fields. Support for summarization by classification is likely to be withdrawn in the medium-term. For more information, go to the Project System IMG and choose Information System ® Responsibility Accounting.

The text which follows describes summarization by master data field. For more information on summarization using classification, read Summarization Using Classification.

The new summarization, by master data, has the following advantages:

Clearer data structures make selection easier and faster.

Summarization is separated from inheritance. It is not necessary to repeat inheritance every time you run summarization.

Inheritance now uses the logical database.

Inheritance can be split into a number of small inheritance runs.

Projects, orders, and so on, can be summarized into one hierarchy, provided that the hierarchy characteristics have the same name.

There is less customizing work to do.

Integration

You can summarize projects along with orders, such as internal orders and production orders. The orders need not be assigned to the project.

The summarized data is then always available for evaluation in the information system.

Features

Summarization combines the objects with attributes in common by means of a hierarchy structure you define yourself. The controlling area is always the top node in the hierarchy. Examples of summarization criteria include:

Business area
Responsible cost centers
User-defined fields

See Summarization Hierarchy.

With the summarization, you can first gain an overview of objects, than process and analyze groups of objects - for example, those with large variances.

You can evaluate the summarization data using the hierarchy and cost element reports in the project information system. The standard system contains both hierarchy reports and cost element reports.

Constraints

In summarization, the system ignores:

Networks which do not reference projects
Plan values from non-appended networks and orders