In general, there is no single sequence to follow in business process planning. However, you should keep certain rules in mind. The following is our recommended procedure, but it is not meant to be binding.

Before you call up the initial planning screen, select a planner profile. You use planner profiles to control the planning process. The SAP System includes multiple standard planner profiles.

Before you call up the initial planning screen, select a planner profile.

We suggest you begin with statistical key figure planning because you can use them to determine plan activity and capacity, as well as use them as tracing factors in plan distribution and assessment.

You can also carry out actual distribution, assessment, or indirect activity allocation on the basis of plan statistical key figures.

Business process planning is based generally on cost center planning, along with activity type planning and tracing factor planning, because the plan activity quantities and capacities influence the plan cost volume for the business processes. All cost center costs relate to the activity types (as tracing factors) and lead to the determination of price for each activity type. Allocation for activity types results in the crediting of the cost center based on the sources of the costs and the corresponding debiting of the business process. This requires price calculation or manual price determination for the plan activities after closing cost center planning.

Planning primary costs follows activity and capacity planning because the activity volumes must be taken into account here.

In primary cost planning, you schedule the main costs (meaning those arising from external sources) for the activity quantities and capacities. You enter these on-line by cost object or cost element. Plan distribution is the last activity undertaken in primary cost planning. Distribution in plan is normally analog to distribution in actual. The primary costs are entered on "collection cost centers" and distributed on a periodic basis according to pre-defined keys. You plan these primary costs (such as telephone, heating, or rent costs) on the collection cost centers for the entire fiscal year and, with plan distribution, assign them to the individual business processes or cost objects in planning.

Before you carry out plan distribution, you must define distribution rules. For the most part, they are identical to the distribution rules defined in actual.

After finishing primary cost planning, you can carry out secondary cost planning. It can be value or quantity based, and carried out manually or automatically.

In secondary cost planning, you schedule the subordinate costs (meaning those arising from internal sources) in the form of activity inputs. You can:

• Plan activity inputs for business processes

• Plan activity inputs for cost objects

In automatic secondary cost planning, you can enter the secondary costs on a value basis in the form of plan assessment, or on a quantity basis in the form of indirect activity allocation, for allocations from cost centers to business processes.

You can use plan assessment for value-based planning of secondary costs. Assessment allocates totals of primary (or primary and secondary) costs from cost centers to business processes or cost objects according to clearly-defined keys.

You have multiple options for output planning:

After closing the planning activities, you can start iterative price calculation. All previous planning transactions form the basis of this activity. The R/3 System calculates the prices iteratively for the activity types by cost center by dividing the plan costs by the plan activity. These prices form the basis of valuation of the activity relationships among the business processes. Only then will the correct allocation of costs to business processes be guaranteed.

Planning ends in the Activity-Based Costing component with the automatic allocation of overhead between business processes and between business processes and cost objects. This allocation is also applicable to both plan and actual. It is similar to cost center assessment.

Integrated planning supports data transfers from the following components to the Cost Center Accounting component (CO-OM-CCA) to be used in cost center planning: