SAP CPM, Which Planning Content is right one for me?

Often during implementation of SAP Commercial Project Management one need to answer the question – which planning content is right one for my client’s business? Most implementation projects take one of the SAP delivered planning content as a basis and extend with rich extensibility tools that technology has to offer here.

Whole decision is quite central to project business needs of your client & may not know where to start. Following infographic helps to match the business needs & right planning content to start with.

Scenarios: 

This represents a set of business needs. SAP CPM Planning content can be broadly categorised into

1. Output/ Productivity based planning – you estimate resources required for a specified units of service. For example you estimate resources for excavation of 230 m3 of trench. So in this case ‘Excavation’ is sort of ‘job’ that you perform and you may plan labour, equipment etc for this ‘job’
2. Qty, Cost and Revenue Planning – you estimate various resources needed for project work packages / activity along project WBS. Simple example something like below. In this example, costs and revenues are calculated based on resource qty. SAP CPM Planning content is much more flexible and allows one to define many variants here.

   WBS	Resource	Jun	July	Aug	Sept
   Blue print	Business Process Consultant	48H	48H	30H	30H
   	Architect	100H	100H	80H	80H
   Implementation	Technical Consultant Sr	200H	200H	100H	100H

    

3. Resource(employee) planning- you may specify the candidates or employees for each resource in the above table OR you may specify skill profile needed, so that you can communicate the skills and hourly demand to external resource management solutions such as SAP MRS

Usecases

This represents set of user actions such as planning(budgeting), forecasting, change request planning & reporting on plan, forecast and change requests.

Frequency

Represents the planning time buckets. Eg: ‘Month’ as a time bucket in above table. Various planning time buckets are available.This time bucket can be flexibly used for months, weeks etc.

I strongly recommend using ‘Fiscal(sometimes referred as periodic within SAP documentation) time bucket’ from flexibility point of view [for e.g.: your needs may change from months to weeks for certain types of projects] and saves efforts in extending your custom extensions into multiple sets of planning content

Definition of fiscal period can be done within transaction OB29.

Query

Input ready query can be used to create planning application by inserting them into SAP Analysis Office workbook or Lumira Designer Application. SAP CPM Input ready queries are defined for combination of scenarios, usecases and frequency. Available planning content is documented within product documentation.

https//help.sap.com

For latest release [S/4HANA 1709], you can find them following this link 

Ready for some hands-on exercise?

Let’s try to figure out a planning query for qty, cost and revenue planning on a monthly planning bucket [I will use fiscal frequency as this is more flexible]

With below screenshot one could find technical name of planning content and use them readily within a workbook.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned for next blog on how to insert this query into an SAP Analysis office workbook to create a planning application.