Monitoring Dates

Purpose

Use this process to monitor the dates of any events connected with components in a project. This means that you can keep these dates, for instance in the procurement process, better under control.

As of Release 4.6C, it is possible to schedule the events in the Monitoring Dates transaction. You can specify the order in which the events occur and the time between events. If you then enter one date, you can schedule all the events for a component in a group.

Prerequisites

To use Monitoring Dates , you must have previously defined events in Customizing the Project System under Start of the navigation path Material Next navigation step Monitoring Dates Next navigation step . End of the navigation path

You can assign reference dates to these events in Customizing.

There are four date types available, which you can assign to an event: baseline, plan, forecast, and actual . In the standard system you can use date fields from objects such as the network activity, the sales document, or the reservation as reference fields. However, you can use a customer enhancement to assign other dates as reference dates. If you have assigned a reference date to a date type, you can no longer change this date manually.

In Customizing you can also Define Statuses and Define Profiles for Monitoring Dates .

Process Flow

  1. In Customizing you define events, and if necessary assign these events reference dates, define statuses, and create profiles. In the scheduling scenario you can define the order in which these events occur, the time (offset) between the events, and whether the settings for an event can be changed in the transaction as well as in Customizing.

  2. On the initial screen for Monitoring Dates , you enter the project, the WBS elements, or the networks for which you want to monitor the dates of the components.

  3. The system selects all the components for the objects entered.

    In order to monitor different components and events together in the Dates overview , you require at least one group to which components and events are assigned.

  4. You create groups to which you assign the components and events, whose dates you want to monitor.

  5. If you have made any entry in Group in the profile, the system automatically creates an initial group, which contains all the selected components.

    At this stage you can also assign a scheduling scenario to the group. This results in the events in the scenario together with their order and relative offsets being copied automatically.

  6. You assign components to the groups . If you want to work with the group created from the profile, delete any components in this group that are not of interest.

  7. You assign events to the groups .

  8. You call up Monitoring Dates .

Result

An overview of the dates for the components and events that are assigned to a group appears. On the dates overview you can filter or sort according to criteria, edit the dates or highlight date variances. For more information, see Functions in the Dates Overview .