To use capacity planning, you must configure various settings in Customizing for PPM. The preceding video provides an overview of the required Customizing activities.
You define the period breakdown and the time unit required for capacity planning in individual portfolio buckets, items, and initiatives. The time units and period types are defined in the Customizing activities Define Capacity Units and Define Period Types.
In the Customizing activity Define Financial and Capacity Categories, first create capacity categories such as management or development. A category consists of an identification and a text. You can create several capacity groups for each category. Project management and quality management are examples of capacity groups for the management category. Every group has an identification, a text, and a distribution type that defines if calendar days or working days are used for the distribution. A capacity group does not exist by itself but is clearly assigned to a superior category.
You create capacity views in the Customizing activity Define Financial and Capacity Views. In addition to the identification and the text, you define whether each capacity view can be used for portfolio items, portfolio buckets, initiatives and/or items of initiatives. Depending on the respective object, you also decide whether the view can be filled manually, or is integrated automatically for FI/CO objects, or is determined using a BAdI, or is rolled up from subordinate objects.
The manual entry of capacity data for portfolio buckets is useful if you want to make a rough estimate of the required capacities. You can compare this with the total of the demands of assigned items. Direct integration with resource planning or actual times is only available for views at the portfolio item level.
Definition of Capacity Views
The portfolio type controls which capacity categories and capacity views are available for a portfolio. You can assign the relevant capacity categories and capacity views to each portfolio type in the Customizing activity Define Financial Capacity Settings for Portfolio Types. You can create chart groups in this Customizing activity to graphically evaluate the capacity data.
If you want to evaluate the views Forecast Demands, Planned Demands, and Actual Capacity Demands together in one chart, create a chart group and assign these three views. If you also want to evaluate the planned demands only, create a second chart group to which you assign only one view. In the capacity planning chart, you can then choose which capacity categories and chart groups are displayed, and switch between the chart groups.
If necessary, not all combinations of capacity categories and capacity views that you assigned to the portfolio type in Customizing are displayed for the capacity planning. In the Customizing activity Define Financial and Capacity View for Front-End Configuration, you can define which combinations of capacity categories and capacity views are valid.
The capacity views and capacity categories that are defined in Customizing for PPM (depending on the portfolio type) must still be created for the buckets, items, and initiatives of a portfolio. That is, they must be activated. You do this by using the program /RPM/PLAN_INT_PREP, which can be executed in the PPM core system using transaction SA38. You can select individual or several items in the selection screen of the program. You can also use a bucket or a complete portfolio as the selection criteria. If necessary, you can first execute a test run before you actually trigger the creation.