You can use investment programs as a supplement for any planning for individual measures and for budgeting in the following areas:

• Planning
• Administration
• Monitoring of a global budget

Investment programs support the annual creation of an investment plan and budget if these are to be monitored globally.

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).