The Investment Management (IM) component provides functions to support the planning, investment, and financing processes for:

• Capital investments, such as the acquisition of fixed assets as the result of-house production or purchase
• Investments in research and development
• Projects that fall primarily under overhead, such as continuing education of employees or establishing new markets
• Maintenance programs

The term investment, therefore, is not limited only to investments you capitalize for bookkeeping or tax purposes. An investment in this context can be any measure that initially causes costs, and that may only generate revenue or provide other benefits after a certain time period has elapsed (for example, plant maintenance projects).

For information on implementing the IM component, refer to the Implementation Guide (IMG) for Investment Management. Choose R/3 Customizing Implementation Guide ® Investment Management.

The investment program and the appropriation request are objects that originate in the IM component. In order to represent the measure, the IM component uses internal orders from Overhead Cost Controlling - Overhead Orders (CO-OM-OPA) and Plant Maintenance (PM), as well as work breakdown structure (WBS) elements from the Project System (PS).

The integration with Asset Accounting (FI-AA) enables you to easily capitalize the costs of internal orders and WBS elements that require capitalization to a fixed asset. Costs that do not require capitalization can be settled to cost accounting.

You can post acquisitions to a measure in the Logistics components of the R/3 System.

The integrated planning process allows you to roll up planned values from appropriation requests and measures on the investment program to which they are assigned. You carry out budgeting of measures, on the other hand, from the top down within the investment program.

You can transfer expected depreciation on all planned investments to management accounting in the form of planned costs.