Project System provides the Project Builder (Transaction CJ20N) and Project Planning Board (Transaction CJ27) to support project planning tasks for SAP S/4HANA.
The Project Planning Board provides a graphic overview (e.g., Gantt charts) of your project’s structure and progress, as shown in the figure below. The Project Planning Board displays the interrelationships of project elements in the project’s organization and the schedule. By simplifying planning, controlling, and monitoring tasks for the project, with the Project Planning Board, you can easily create, change, and display projects for solutions like SAP S/4HANA.
Once you finish structuring your project by defining its WBS structure, networks, and activities, you can plan the following facets of a project:
- Dates
- Resources
- Materials
- Revenues
- Cost planning
- Payments
To help you prepare for the SAP Certified Application Associate - Business Process Integration with SAP S/4HANA exam (C_TS410), we’ll explain some of these planning processes in the following subsections.
Scheduling
You can use WBS scheduling or network scheduling to plan the dates. In WBS scheduling, you can use bottom-up planning or top-down planning scenarios; other dates in the hierarchy are calculated by extrapolation. In the bottom-up planning scenario, network activities are scheduled based on the planned dates in the network header, and the scheduled dates are assigned to WBS elements. In the top-down scenario, you manually enter the dates of the WBS element, and the scheduling of assigned activities is performed based on the planned dates of the WBS element. In network scheduling, all activities of a network are scheduled based on backward or forward scheduling. You can also perform overall network scheduling to schedule several networks linked via external relationships.
Resource Planning
In resource planning, you can plan the internal and external resources you can use to execute the project’s activities. The next figure shows the work center, duration, and activity type for an internally processed activity. Capacity planning with work centers, workforce planning, capacity leveling, planning for services, or externally processed activities (creating purchase requisitions) are the tasks that can be carried out in resource planning.
Material Planning
In material planning, you plan the materials required for project activities. The first step is to assign material components to activities, as shown below. The system generates reservations or purchase requisitions for the material components based on the item category (stock or nonstock) material. The material withdrawal (for stock materials) and delivery (of nonstock materials services) are also planned in material planning.
Cost Planning
In cost planning, you plan the costs you expect to incur during the execution of project activities. The system provides the following cost planning options:
Network Costing
The system automatically calculates the planned costs (for procurement, consumption of resources, and material) based on dates, resource, and material planning results, as shown in the final figure.
Planning Costs at the WBS Level
In this type of planning, you plan costs at the WBS element level. You may prefer this approach if you map your project into the system by using only WBS elements. You can choose between the following options:
- Cost element-based cost planning (e.g., unit costing, detailed planning, and easy cost planning)
- Period based cost planning (e.g., detailed planning)
- Structure-oriented (hierarchical) cost planning (e.g., planning costs for each WBS element and breaking down totals by fiscal year)
Learn more about the different versions of SAP S/4HANA here.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book SAP S/4HANA Business Process Integration Certification Guide Application Associate Exam by Murat Adivar.
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