Any company selling project to customers or running large internal projects can now take their project operations to the next level, leveraging new solution offerings from SAP.
Rising customer expectations, a dramatically changing workforce, pressure on resources and the explosion of data require companies to take their operations to the next level. With 20% of worldwide business realized via commercial projects, plus internal projects making up for an increasing share of value creation, project management is more and more getting into the focus to further professionalize.
Taking an end-to-end approach to manage projects along their whole life cycle typically improves project profitability by several percentage points. Applying best practices in five areas of project management are key to make it happen.
- Collaborative bidding: When projects are sold to customers, their profitability to a large extent gets determined already at the bid stage. When overestimated and overpriced, the bid is not competitive and will be lost. When underestimated and underpriced, the project will be unprofitable from day one. To derive the right bid, it is essential to closely collaborate with all stakeholders during bid creation, understand and incorporate learnings from past projects, and plan with accurate data.
- Portfolio management: For internal projects, investments need to be carefully traded-off and chosen. A consistent approach to derive, plan and monitor a portfolio of projects is essential to maximize the return on assets and scarce resources.
- Resource management: Acomprehensive view on project staff capacities with their priorities, job skills, travels times etc. allows to leverage and optimize delivery capabilities across organizational boundaries. Utilization as well as customer service can be increased.
- Reliable forecasting: As of today, there are typically many process and tool breaks during the course of a project, from bidding to planning to forecasting to execution. Knowledge and insight gets lost when moving from one stage to the next. To overcome this, a seamless end-to-end process needs to be established to manage costs, quantities and revenues.
- Issue and change management: Executing unapproved or unbilled changes is huge profitability drain today. To change this, all issues and change requests need to be
captured, their implications on schedule, costs and revenues be understood, consciously decided upon, and then incorporated into all downstream processes.
To effectively apply those best practices, a common project knowledge foundation for collaboration, insight and control is a pre-requisite. Project managers and other project
staff and stakeholders need attractive views and tool to access this foundation and take best informed actions and decisions. With its solution offerings around its new flagship product Commercial Project Management SAP offers such a foundation and toolset to now take project operations to the next level. Commercial Project Management brings project-related front- and back-end information into one integrated system and makes it available to project managers, administrators and executives.
Learn more about SAP Commercial Project Management under http://www.sap.com/commercial-project-management. Watch a 2 minute overview video
Learn more about SAP Project and Portfolio Management under http://www.sap.com/solution/lob/r-and-d/software/portfolio-project-management-overview/index.html
