This scenario concerns the first phase of product development. The trigger may be an inquiry, a quotation, an order, or a new development for the make-to-stock market. The SAP Project System supports the development. SAP DMS and the SAP Classification System also come into use.

The SAP Document Management System supports you in structured description and storage of your product ideas. You can define completely separate document types in order to keep your product ideas separate from other documents. The document info record is a central object in document management and is flexible enough to be used for recording administrative data and any other data you require. The Classification System lets you define customer-specific fields for this additional information, which you can then search on. You can also use document info records to link to and manage any type of file including scanned-in drawings and text of any kind.

You can execute an analysis of the competition to monitor and evaluate the activities of your competition. The required data is collected, for example, by your sales personnel during the course of the business day and stored in a special material master record for competitive products in the SAP System

You create a material master record for a competitor product (material type WETT) in the same way as an internal material master record. You can enter basic information like material description, material group, weight, and volume. You must assign a product to a certain competitor. You can enter a product hierarchy on the basic data screen of the master record. The product hierarchy helps you to analyze the product range of a competitor and compare it to your own. You can enter texts with detailed information for each competitor product. You can put a link to the competitor's website in the master record of the competitive product.

The customer sends an inquiry about creating a new, customer-specific product. The inquiry contains a description of the product and its basic requirements.

You create a customer quotation based on the inquiry. Next, you carry out a feasibility study, verifying whether the product can be realized technically and commercially.

The SAP Project System supports your complex product development process. Before creating a new project you can, for example, use the Classification System to search for similar projects. In the Project System, you can create templates for work breakdown structures (WBS), networks, and milestones. This way, you can store structures that are used often in the system, and use them later as the basis for creating operational structures.

The WBS is a hierarchical arrangement of the project activities to be carried out. The WBS is the basis of cost and finance planning, scheduling, and budget assignment. The planned process flow for product development is represented in the network. An activity is created for each task. You can map time-based dependencies between processes by using relationships. You can refine the project structure as the project progresses.

Documents and drawings that specify the individual project tasks are stored using the Document Management System, classified, and assigned to individual work packages in the WBS, or to activities in networks.

The scenario ends when you release the project.

You can use the results of cost planning to determine the project budget. The SAP System's availability control facility supports you in monitoring the budget. Budget overruns can be detected automatically, enabling you to take prompt countermeasures. Releasing the budget and the project triggers processing.