Project Processing Concentrating on Cost Controlling

If you use projects as cost control tools, cost planning which is high performance, clear, and easy to use is particularly important.

Easy Cost Planning meets this requirement. It has the additional advantage that, as the project progresses, you can start a range of follow-up processes, called the "execution services", from the cost estimate. The Execution Services include the purchase requisitions, purchase orders, material reservations, goods issues, and internal activity allocation. As the system carries out Execution Services with the help of the data entered for the costing, there is no need for duplicated data entry for further processing to take place. If necessary, you can overwrite the data calculated by the costing model, since the data is only intended as default values.

Simplified Preliminary Costing for Complex Projects

You use the Project System to process complex overhead cost projects or customer projects. In this case, you can use Easy Cost Planning to perform simple and effective preliminary costing.

You create your concurrent cost estimate after the project is approved or when the order is received, using the networks from your WBS. The preliminary costing is preserved for analysis purposes in a separate CO version.

Easy Cost Planning

You access the function via the Project Builder.

The work breakdown structure is an element of the costing structure, which you use to plan and calculate costs. You can subdivide the costing structure as you want; the changes you make will not affect the WBS. This way, you retain a clear overview of your cost planning at project level.

You enter the data for the cost estimate in the planning forms you have defined; these are the costing models. You use the costing models to map typical business processes that usually incur costs in the same way. You enter data typical of the business process in the model; this data comprises values that incur costs, such as days required, number of documents to be produced, and required quantity. The system uses the chosen characteristics to generate the costing items for the unit costing. If necessary, you can postprocess the unit costing.

Costing structures transferred from an appropriation request to the top WBS element can be copied simply via drag and drop to lower level WBS elements in the differentiated project structure.

The system distributes the planned costs along the time axis, in line with the basic dates in the WBS elements. The systemadapts the cost distribution automatically if the project schedule changes. If you have not maintained basic dates, the system automatically copies the data from date control, which you maintain in the Project System IMG under  Costs Planned Costs Easy Cost Planning and Execution Services Easy Cost Planning Create Costing Variant .

SAP Media contains further functions for performing time distribution by manually assigning freely definable distribution keys, for example to plan revenue distribution based on characteristic sales curves.

You can also carry out costing from Easy Cost Planning in a simulation version, which you can also create and process in the Project Builder.

You can also use data from Easy Cost Planning to carry out sales pricing for customer projects and, if required, use this data as the basis for creating an attractive quotation. The integration of Easy Cost Planning and sales pricing with the Project Builder means that you can control the whole business process - from creating the project to carrying out sales pricing - using just one tool.

Execution Services

You can trigger the following activities (the Execution Services) using the quantity structure entered in the costing:

The Execution Services function selects the costing items for the process to be triggered. The system displays simultaneously the existing postings for the service concerned. For example, if you want to trigger a purchase order for a WBS element, the system displays the purchase orders already posted for this WBS element, to avoid duplication.

For more information, see Triggering the Execution Services .

The structure, hierarchy, and cost element reports are also available, along with those from SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI) .