The investment program can be used to augment planning and budgeting at the level of the individual measure by offering planning, budgeting and monitoring of a comprehensive budget . Investment programs are helpful to enterprises that create an investment plan and a budget annually, and wish to monitor the budget as a whole, rather than just at the level of individual measures. Using investment programs, you can obtain an overview of planning and budgeting processes in complex enterprise structures for all investments and large projects of the group, while at the same time maintaining strict budgetary control.

The Investment Programs component provides functions for planning and monitoring of investment budgets encompassing many different measures, on a cyclical basis, of an entire corporate group. You can benefit from the integration of this component with the Investment Measures and Appropriation Requests components. Measures and appropriation requests can be assigned to investment program positions. By rolling up their plan values in the investment program, these measures and appropriation requests are integrated in the comprehensive investment planning process. At the same time, you can budget and oversee the measures using the investment program.

Comprehensive investment programs in the SAP R/3 System offer the advantage of their direct integration with the individual measures (orders or WBS elements), in contrast to non-integrated planning systems. By means of this integration, you are quickly made aware if your comprehensive budget is overrun. You can also monitor expenses for both external acquisitions as well as internal costs (activity allocation, overhead).