Completing SPM Project Monitoring Phase Activities

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

Explain the purpose of the monitoring phase in an SPM project.
Start and hide a recurring phase.
Publish survey and scorecard documents in a recurrence.

SPM Monitoring Phase Overview

Recurring Phase
- Time-based repeating phase
- Controlled by a ‘master’
- Documents and tasks repeat in date-stamped folders
Manually start the first recurrence

Note

SAP Ariba Best Practice: Recurrence patterns may differ based on supplier segmentation or, perhaps, relationship type – monthly, quarterly, yearly

Monitoring Phase Overview

Recurring phases allow for a group of tasks with their associated documents to automatically repeat based on a defined time period, usually monthly or quarterly. The benefit of recurring phases is that they allow the use of only one project to manage a supplier for a long period of time and more easily creating trending data. For example, if you have a recurring quarterly supplier performance review that involves three tasks for each recurrence and a survey, a scorecard and a report, you can set up a recurring phase containing those tasks linked to the master documents. As the result of this recurring process, the data produced from the surveys and the scorecards can be used in analytical reports showing trends over time.

Recurring phases are controlled by a ‘master’ recurring phase that is used to create each occurrence of the phase. Each time a new phase is generated from the master recurring phase. The system automatically names it with the same name as the master phase, but the month and year of the next recurrence are appended to the end of the name.

The documents associated with tasks in the recurring phase are also replicated for each iteration of the phase. The master versions of the documents reside within a master folder on the Documents tab. Each time a new phase is generated from the master recurring phase, the system automatically creates a new folder containing new copies of the documents with the corresponding month and year appended to the end of the folder name.

Monitoring Phase: Additional Iterations

Are triggered automatically at time interval
Can be triggered manually
Continue until stopped manually or the project ends

Additional iterations occur on a timely basis depending on how the master phase is set up: Quarterly, monthly, etc. Although the recurrence is expected to continue until the end of the project, it can also be triggered manually.

SPM Monitoring Phase Activities

Survey setup
- Rules (due date), participants and content
- Publish
Participants respond
Monitoring responses
After survey closes, set the Performance Period and publish the scorecard
- Survey needs to be closed and scorecard needs to be published for data to move to reporting

Monitoring Phase Activities

The most important steps of the monitor phase are to publish and respond to the survey and to publish the scorecard. Typically, there are no changes to the survey from the master created in the planning phase, so this step is usually very easy. Possible changes to the survey in the monitoring phase will be discussed later.

Once the survey is published, the respondents receive emails informing them that the surveys are ready to be completed. The project owner can monitor who has completed the surveys, what their responses and comments are and how close the survey is to its closing time.

Once the survey closes, the information from the survey is automatically moved to the scorecard, where it can be reviewed. When the owner is ready, the performance period can be entered and the scorecard is published.