Release Notes for Business Package
for PPMDC 4.0 SP1
Front End Release Notes
This version of the Business Package for Projects, Portfolio Management, and Design Collaboration (PPMDC) contains several new features and enhancements.
These new features are summarized below. For full details, see the relevant sections of the documentation.
· Flexible Portfolio Hierarchies:
The overall structure of a portfolio is reflected in the hierarchy of buckets. This allows a flexible categorization of portfolios. This hierarchy will be the basis for management of the application.
· Strategic Financial Planning:
Addressing the portfolio planning process, xRPM will support financial planning along a defined timeline. Per portfolio item, different financial views (Forecasted, Planned or Actual) can be tracked early on in the planning process in order to provide consistent data for making portfolio decisions. Additionally, xRPM will provide reporting capabilities from this planning data.
· Strategic Capacity Planning
Similar to the strategic financial planning functionality, xRPM will support the capacity planning along a defined timeline. Also supporting capacity views (Forecasted, Planned, Actual), the capacity planning will have 2 levels of granularity from the capacity planning categories and then further broken down into groups. In addition to the staffing and management of resources, xRPM will reconcile the planning information with the actual resource numbers to help manage any potential bottlenecks in the short term and to assist with future capacity allocations.
· Scoring (Questionnaires, Scoring Models):
Building upon the prioritization scenario in xRPM 2.0, scoring in the application will help portfolio managers make decisions based upon information already available in the system. Such is the case with Scoring Models as they will utilize existing portfolio item data as criteria for items to be compared against one another. The end result is a ranked list of items when compared against coming criteria. One additional feature is the introduction of questionnaires. A questionnaire will help quantify a given criteria (i.e. risk) in order to further add structure around the evaluation and decision making process.
· Portfolio Reviews
Supporting reviews of the entire portfolio or a subset of the portfolio, xRPM will introduce portfolio reviews. A portfolio review will enable the portfolio manager to collect a specific set of portfolio items by advanced search functionality, invite specific users, and measure these items with specific charts and scoring models.
· Portfolio Dashboards
Improvements to the UI, utilizing advanced filtering capabilities, and support for various portfolio item types will be introduced in the new xRPM dashboard.
· Portfolio Analytics
SAP xRPM provides predefined analysis scenarios that are ready to go to better identify, select, prioritize, and manage a portfolio of projects and to quickly monitor the status of portfolio items. It is also important to look at the long-term portfolio: What were the planned values and what are the actual, and how does the revenue/cash flow develop along the timeline? Some projects might have low revenue right now, but have high forecasted revenue at the end of the project. In order to make the proper decisions, portfolio managers need to have the cost/revenue/cash flow information along the timeline.
Backend Release Notes
Global Settings
The SAP xRPM global settings have been updated in the following areas:
· Global Field Settings
There is a new, extensive set of field configurations. These configurations allow customers to define field services, as well as to define UI-specific field handling. To set the global field options, go to the SAP xRPM Implementation Guide (IMG) and chooseGlobal Customizing --> Global Field Settings.
If you intend to use any field configurations, you must configure UI-options for each field:
¡ Enabled
If set to enabled, the field is displayed as a regular field. If set to disabled, the field is grayed-out.
¡ Visible
If set to visible, the field is displayed on the screen. If set to hidden, the field is hidden from the user.
¡ Read Only
This setting determines whether or not a field can be edited by the user.
¡ Required
This setting specifies whether a value is required, or not required, to be specified in the configured field.
· Define Services and Assign by Global Field Settings
SAP xRPM now supports several field-related services. You can assign services to fields on various business objects. Two new services are the questionnaires and the scoring models:
¡ Questionnaires
Questionnaires are currently only supported on the portfolio item business object.
Questionnaires allow you to define sets of questions and responses which are then evaluated to generate a score between 0 and 100.
To define a questionnaire, go to the SAP xRPM Implementation Guide (IMG) and choose Global Customizing -->Process and Service Settings --> Define Questionnaires.
The questionnaire service can be assigned to specific portfolio item fields. To do so, go to the SAP xRPM Implementation Guide (IMG) and choose Global Customizing --> Global Field Settings --> Define Custom Field Configuration.
The bucket business object has UI configuration that allows the bucket administrator to specify which questionnaires will be utilized for the portfolio items managed by the bucket.
¡ Scoring Models
Scoring models are currently only supported on the portfolio item and review business objects. Scoring models allow customers to choose sets of fields that are evaluated against specific criteria to generate a score between 0 and 100.
To define a scoring model, go to the SAP xRPM Implementation Guide (IMG) and choose Global Customizing --> Process and Service Settings. --> Define Scoring Models.
The scoring model service can be assigned to specific portfolio item fields. Go to the SAP xRPM Implementation Guide (IMG) and choose Global Customizing --> Global Field Settings --> Define Custom Field Configuration.
The bucket business object has UI configuration that allows the bucket administrator to specify which scoring models will be utilized for the portfolio items managed by the bucket.
Portfolio Types
Portfolio types essentially define a template for different portfolios in xRPM. They contain the definitions for what item types are supported, and which financial capacity categories or groups will be used.
Maximum flexibility between diverse sets of portfolios is now enabled because the global field configuration can be overridden in order to define portfolio-type specific field configurations.
Portfolio Item Types
You can now configure item types for proposals, projects, and so forth. You can manage several distinct items within one specific portfolio because you can configure for each item different decision points and required fields.
To configure portfolio item types, go to the SAP xRPM Implementation Guide (IMG) and choose Global Customizing --> Portfolio Independent Settings --> Define Portfolio Item Types.
Navigation
Portal navigation can be customized per portfolio type to allow flexible navigation links and actions for specific portfolios.
To define navigation, go to the SAP xRPM Implementation Guide (IMG) and choose Global Customizing --> Process and Service Settings --> Define Navigation.
Financial and Capacity Categories or Groups
Both buckets and items now support financial capacity planning. To support uniform planning across specific portfolios, financial planning and capacity planning categories can be defined to identify the high-level planning objects that will be used for planning purposes in the portfolio.
Each category is further refined by defining various planning groups that are used for direct planning purposes and are summed to the respective category.
Planning groups can be copied on a user interface to allow additional refinements of the planning data. In other words, the group could be defined to be funded or supported via business units other than the default business unit.
To configure financial and capacity categories or groups, go to the SAP xRPM Implementation Guide (IMG) and choose Global Customizing --> Portfolio Independent Settings --> Define Financial and Capacity Categories.
Project Integration
Via configuration tables, you can now define mappings between the xApp Product Definition (xPD), and various project system business objects, to the xRPM business objects.
The business object mapping support varies among supported applications. You can find the configuration under each specific application integration node in the SAP xRPM Implementation Guide (IMG) under the section: Base System Interfaces.
Security
There are now two authorization concepts in xRPM 4.0: SAP User Roles and Access Control Lists (ACLs).
· User Roles
There are two pre-configured user roles delivered with xRPM 4.0. You can view these roles via Role Maintenance (transaction PFCG). They can also be used as a basis for customer-specific roles.
The roles are:
¡ SAP_XRPM_USER
¡ SAP_XRPM_ADMINISTRATOR
· Access Control Lists
These are authorizations assigned to specific business objects. They control user access to these objects.
For more details on these authorizations concepts, please refer to the SAP Project and Portfolio Management Security Guide.