Struggling to get Portfolio and Project Management reports from your IT department? Self-reliance is the name of the game

When talking to customers about Portfolio and Project Management, the questions I hear most often are around reporting. Which reporting tools do you support? What type of reports are available out of the box? Etc. Now if you get into the discussion, what it very often comes down to, is that although the information is somewhere out there – typically in a Business Warehouse system – business users don’t get to see it in the way they need it to support their business.

So when I first heard about SAP Lumira – which is all about self-service data visualization – I really wanted to try this out based on SAP Portfolio and Project Management 6.1 data and now, I proudly present: my first Lumira Portfolio Review Report.

How to get there? There are 4 steps involved

1. Prepare: This is about the preparation of the data, I was using a XLS file, based on one of the portfolio dashboards that we have in our demo systems. However Lumira can e.g. also consume SAP Business Warehouse Queries or Infoprovider which we provide quite a number of in the standard PPM content, so that would be the way to go if you wanted to use this in standard.

2. Visualize: I created a number of visualizations and calculated some KPIs, based on the information.

3. Compose: In this step I put together the visualization and KPIs I created earlier, added some texts and played around with different types of layout.

4. Share: I published my Portfolio Report to the SAP Lumira cloud so I am able to share it with colleagues.

Although I have a development background I have to say that I always struggle when it comes to visualizing data but this tool made it really easy for me.

From a PPM perspective, I think this is a nice way to get your business reports to look the way you want them to look while having the information that you need to make the decisions to steer your organization. So it targets here more decision makers and stakeholders. To get the complete picture of portfolio and project management reporting you will still need additional ways of access like portfolio dashboards, standardized BW reports and SAP Fiori apps.

If you want to learn more about reporting in PPM and how SAP Portfolio and Project Management can help to manage your Capital investment projects more efficiently visit the Capital PPM microforums at European Utility Week, 3-5 November 2015, Vienna, Austria.

– Monitor and control performance of capital projects with SAP Smart Business Execution Dashboards

– Gain insights into your project portfolio through real-time analytics provided by SAP Portfolio and Project Management and SAP Lumira