SAP Smart Business for Project Execution

[Former Member]

Project Managers typically have little time and patience to work with any IT-systems to run their projects. On the other side they always need to be on top of the statuses of their projects and take corrective measures as soon as possible if required.

SAP Smart Business for Project Execution is a great solution for project managers to monitor project execution and to focus on the most important aspects like deviations, critical and upcoming tasks.

From the project manager’s perspective, the whole process should be very simple:

gain insight → collaborate → take action

Let’s have a look at a concrete example, to see how SAP Smart Business for Project Execution can achieve this.

1. Gain Insight

The entry point is always the personalized Fiori Launchpad (Fig. 1) which offers a comprehensive overview of all projects. Here a project manager can scan for existing deviations and risks across all projects assigned to him.

Figure 1: SAP Smart Business for Project Execution – Fiori Launchpad View

Next, we will open the project report app which offers an immediate overview on the key aspects of all projects (Fig. 2). The project manager can focus on a particular project where problems were reported and analyze costs, scheduling and work assignments.

Figure 2: Project Report App

A very nice feature is that drill-downs are always possible with just a few click. For example, the distribution of planned and actual costs can be analyzed along the project timeline and value categories (Fig. 3). The project manager can go up to the line item level and related CO or reference documents for more details.

Figure 3: Project Cost Report

In our example the progress of Project “Paris” is behind schedule and the planned work is already exceeded. The project manager can analyze the WBS element with exceeding work in more detail. He observes that for the assembly the planned work recently has been exceeded as well (Fig. 4). In order to prohibit further time recordings for assembly related activities until further clarification he can lock the assembly WBS element and assigned activities. But team members should be notified about this problem and the change. Here the integration with SAP Jam comes into place. The project manager can use SAP Jam to request more information on the work deviation from his team and inform them about the status change.

Figure 4: WBS Element – insight & associated actions

2. Collaborate

Team members can see the request of their project manager in SAP JAM. They can start a collaboration to find the best solution (Fig. 5). They can create for example a new Pro/Con Table to brainstorm together on potential ways to make good for the work deviations. The project manager is informed about the reason for the deviation and also gets solution proposals, like for example to change the sequence of the final test activities.

Figure 5: SAP Jam - project collaboration group

3. Take Action

The project manager sees the notifications from his team members in his Launchpad, he does not need to check the SAP Jam group on a regular basis. If he is fine with the proposed solution, he can unlock the assembly WBS element and activities (Fig. 6) and use the “Share on SAP Jam” feature to communicate the changes.

Figure 6: Changing the status of a WBS Element

Summary

We have seen how simple it can be for project managers to identify and mitigate problems. The key message and value proposition of SAP Smart Business for Project Execution can be summarized to the following points:

• Holistic real-time  transparency on projects statuses, critical variances and risks anywhere, anytime and on any device
• Capabilities to drill-down to analyze root causes, from high level deviation and risk KPIs to line item level and factsheets
• Insight to action pattern: take immediately corrective measures using transactional apps, or leveraging SAP JAM for collaboration on next steps 

For more information please check out the following links:

• SAP Smart Business for Project Execution on SAP Help Portal
• SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA Fact Book - R&D and Engineering
• SAP Smart Business for Project Execution – YouTube Video

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