Resource and Time Management with
cProjects
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 or other enterprises. The project members you have chosen can record the working hours for their tasks 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 capacities of the project members to specific projects and tasks.
Prerequisites
You have completed the Project Planning with cProjects process and have defined project roles for the project.
Process Flow
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1. Define demand for resources (cProject Suite and SAP xRPM)
First, you plan the resource requirements by assigning a required capacity to individual project roles within a certain time frame.
Planning the required capacity for the tasks in the project and assigning the tasks to the project roles provides a picture of the capacity required for each role. You decide whether you want to use the required capacity determined by the task to role assignment or whether you want to carry out planning only based on the roles.
2. Specify required qualifications (optional) (cProject Suite)
You can specify qualifications for both the individual roles and the tasks. These qualifications are necessary for staffing a role or completing a task.
3. Allocate resources (cProject Suite and SAP xRPM)
If you know which employees will be members of your project, you can assign them to the project roles straight away. You can also take the data from your portfolio planning (SAP xRPM) into account when you select your resources.
However, you can also use the search function to find suitable employees for your project. The following search criteria are available for finding suitable employees:
¡ The required qualifications summarized from the roles and the tasks assigned to them
¡ The time frame in which the role is required
¡ The organizational unit you want the employee to be from
You then choose the most suitable persons from the employees listed in the results, taking into account when they are available.
If time intervals overlap, you can also assign more than one person to a role.
If tasks exist in your enterprise for which no suitable employee is available, you can transfer the resource requirement to SAP SRM. Suitable persons with the required qualifications and capacities can be identified here and a purchase order can then be created. For more information, see the following processes:
¡ Requesting External Staff
¡ Entering Services in SRM
¡ Searching for Sources of Supply
Once a suitable person has been found, you can assign this person to the task.
4. Confirm time and progress (cProject Suite and SAP ERP)
Once the project has been released, project members can record time for the activities they have performed. Activities are confirmed for the following project elements depending on the project type:
¡ Project definition
¡ Project roles to which the project member is assigned
¡ Tasks to which the project member is assigned via the role
The project member can confirm both the actual work and the actual start date for the individual tasks and then also adjust the remaining work if the total for this is different to the work calculated automatically by the system.
Alternatively, you can record your time directly in the Cross Application Time Sheet (CATS) in mySAP ERP. It is then automatically transferred to cProjects. For more information, see the Time Recording process.
Result
Defining the demand for resources (process step 1) provides the basis for costing in the Project Accounting with cProjects process. Carrying out process steps 2 and 3 leads to more accurate results in costing.