If you use the Project System to process complex overhead cost projects or customer projects, where approval or placing of orders depends on creating the quotation, a preliminary costing that is simple to carry out and accurate is very important.
From this release, quantity- and characteristic-based cost planning at project structure level gives you the best possible support in the preliminary costing.
Overview of the Function:
With Easy Cost Planning, you can enter a temporary quantity structure for the costing during the prelminary costing phase when it is not clear what the final quantity structure will look like. The system uses the prices and rates already stored to value your entries, and distributes the costs according to the lifetime of the respective WBS elements.
You can carry out sales pricing based on the planned costs the system has calculated, without having to change transaction.
When the project is approved or the order is received, you can use networks to carry out concurrent costing. The preliminary costing remains in a separate plan version, for analysis purposes.
The Function in Detail
Use Project Builder to access the function.
The costing hierarchy used to plan and calculate costs is based on the project structure. You can extend the costing hierarchy as you want; the additional structuring has no effect on the project structure. In this way, you gain a good view of your cost planning at project level.
You can enter the costing data in a planning template you have created, called the costing model. You use costing models to depict your conventional business processes, whose costs always occur in a similar way. You enter data typical of the business processe, called "characteristics" (such as material or the number of products to be produced) in the model. The system automatically uses the chosen characteristics to create the costing items for R/3 unit costing; these are displayed and you can further process them if required.
The planned costs are distributed along the time axis, in accordance with the basic dates in the WBS elements. The link between the planned costs and the planned dates means that the cost distribution is adjusted automatically if any of the dates change.
In the standard, the values calculated are recorded in CO version 0. However, as concurrent planning is effected using networks once the order has been places, define a CO version other than 0 for the update of planned costs from the preliminary costing. You can compare the two planning states in reporting.
From the Project Builder, you can carry out a sales pricing, based on the planned values calculated.
Simulation versions enable you to carry out and compare as many project costings and sales pricings as you want, without having to create an operative project.
In the standard, the planned preliminary costing values calculated are recorded in CO version 0. If required, you can define an additional CO version in Project System customizing for recording planned values.
For more information on the sales pricing, refer to Sales Pricing.
You can also use project costing for projects that act as cost control instruments. For more information, see Easier Processing of Projects Concentrating on Cost Controlling