Resource and Time Management with the Project System 

Purpose

You can use this business process to plan the necessary quantitative and qualitative resources for a project and staff project roles with suitable employees from your enterprise. The project members you have chosen can record their working hours in the project afterwards.

The advantages of resource planning are that you have the option of planning resources to the appropriate level of detail and in doing this, can assign the available and most capable employees from the right organizational units to the project. Time recording enables you to assign the capacity of the project members to specific projects and tasks.

Prerequisites

You have created a network.

Process Flow

The following business process runs in SAP ECC:

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       1.      Define demand for resources based on work centers

You plan the resources for the work that is not procured as an external service via purchasing, but is carried out internally.

You specify this work and the work center required for processing in your own network activities. The system determines the required capacity for the project when scheduling.

The most important resources in a project are the project members. Workforce planning for personnel resources enables the workload for network activities to be distributed among persons, positions, or HR organizational units for a specific period.

The system can determine the capacity availability from the work center or from the HR work schedule.

       2.      Carry out capacity leveling (optional)

You compare the planned required capacity with the available capacity of the work centers involved. Scheduling activities is the central function of capacity leveling. Activities are scheduled so that they are fixed to a certain point in time at which enough capacity is available to carry them out. Scheduling subactivities and work elements is also possible.

       3.      Trigger and monitor resource procurement (optional)

You can create externally processed activities or external elements in the network, for example, giving an order to a design office for the construction of a machine.

An activity of this kind requires a purchase requisition that is processed further in purchasing. For external processing, you can use data from purchasing, for example, a purchasing info record that contains the prices and delivery times for external processing.

Progress Trackingallows you to monitor the progress of network components in the project system and orders in materials management.

       4.      Confirm time and progress (optional)

Confirmations document the processing status of activities and activity elements in the network and enable you to make a prognosis for how the project will continue to progress. Accurate confirmations are a must for realistic and precise project planning.

Once the project has been released, project members can record their working time for the project in different ways. The project member can confirm actual dates and actual durations for the individual network activities in addition to the actual work, degree of processing, and the following:

¡        The expected reasons for planned variances.

¡        Prognosis values for remaining work and remaining duration.

Confirming time during the project gradually reduces the required capacity.

For more information, see the Time Recording process.

       5.      Analyze project progress

You use the progress analysis to compare the planned and current project progress with the progress actually achieved. The system evaluates the progress achieved either in relation to the total planned costs or to the budget; in the latter case, the evaluation takes place independently of the costs periodically planned or posted in the Controlling (CO) component.

The progress analysis is above all suitable for projects with the following attributes:

¡        Time-critical

¡        Extensive, that is, you have planned a large number of work packages

¡        Resource-intensive, for example, due to development hours in a research and development project

¡        The progress is independent of the costs that are incurred, that is, you cannot measure the progress of the project by the costs already incurred.

The progress determination provides you with information about the percentage of completion and the earned value:

¡        The percentage of completion shows the ratio of the activity performed up to a certain day to the total activity planned for a project or activity (DIN 69901).

¡        The earned value describes the costs incurred to bring an activity or project to its current degree of completion (DIN 69903).

Result

Planning the resource requirements in process steps 1 and 2 provides the basis for network costing in the Project Accounting with PS process.