Planning with the Status and Tracking System 

Use

You use this function to execute planning in accordance with the definitions determined by the Status and Tracking System for the current planning session within the subplan to be edited.

Prerequisites

You have completed Customizing the Status and Tracking System for at least one combination of subplan and planning session. For more information, see Customizing the Status and Tracking System.

Procedure

The Status and Tracking System is used as an environment in which to both carry out planning and monitor the planning process. This results in two different procedures for working with the Status and Tracking System:

·        Performing planning: Important for persons responsible who are assigned to an area of responsibility either directly or as a substitute and who want to perform planning in that area.

·        Monitoring planning results: Important for persons responsible who have areas of responsibility assigned to them so that they can check planning results in these areas.

·        Monitoring the planning process: Importantfor the planning coordinator.

The Status and Tracking System presents the pages which belong to a planning task in practically an identical form – independent of whether you want to execute planning or monitor the process.  The only difference is that the possibilities to set the status of a task depend on which level of the hierarchy you are assigned to (this means whether you execute a certain task or are the superior).

If you are assigned to a superior level in the organizational hierarchy as a person responsible and have made the corresponding settings in Customizing, you can change the status of all tasks that are assigned to you and the employees you are in charge of with one single action. A cascading status switch of this type along the hierarchy is possible with bottom-up planning sessions for the following status switches:

·         From “new” to “in process”

·         From “in process” to “for approval”

·         From “for approval” to “in process”.

This is possible with top-down planning sessions for the following status switches:

·         Completed and released

·         In process.

If you have defined planning sequences in Customizing that are to be executed automatically upon status switch, the following is to be noted with a cascading status switch: No planning sequences are executed. The status for the areas of responsibility is merely set.

Note that all times in the monitor (such as the time at which comments were entered) are given in the time zone that the logged-on user has maintained in the user master data.  If no time zone has been maintained, the system time zone is used.

An exception to this is completion time: If no time zone has been maintained, the system first checks whether an explicit time zone has been specified in Customizing for the particular area of responsibility.    If  it has, this is used. If not, the system time zone is used.