Integrating Resource and Capacity Planning

After finishing planning and allocation of the project resources, John wants to communicate to portfolio manager Sarah the demands of his project(s). He plans to transfer the planned and allocated demand to the portfolio items of the SAP Project Management project and to the portfolio buckets. Sarah can then directly analyze the capacity planning data in SAP Portfolio Management.

Using SAP Portfolio and Project Management capacity planning, you can plan requirements for capacities or resources for individual periods at the portfolio bucket level or item level. This planning refers to capacity categories, groups, and views, which you can freely define in SAP Portfolio and Project Management.

Values that you have planned at the portfolio item level can be rolled up to parent portfolio buckets with the relevant settings. You can manually perform capacity planning at the portfolio item level or derive it from role demands or resource assignments of SAP Project Management projects as described below.

Resource data can be integrated in two ways. The demand and resource assignments on role level can be mapped to combinations of capacity groups and views. You can do this using a role function that you can assign to a role within the role definition. You can manually define roles and the staffing of these roles in Project Management, or derive them from other assigned project management applications. The other option is to determine actual capacity requirements from the confirmed activities. This requires integration with a financial system in which activity values were entered using the cross-application time sheet (CATS).

If resource data has been integrated into capacity planning, you can roll this data up to the parent portfolio buckets. At the bucket level, you can perform aggregated evaluations and compare the data to your original forecast capacity planning data.

Besides the capacity data, Sarah is also interested in the financial planning of the project assigned to her portfolio. She therefore asks John how to access the financial project data on an aggregated level for project programs or portfolios. John shows her the integration of the cost collector to SAP Portfolio Management, to be able to derive the data directly from it.

Using SAP Portfolio and Project Management financial planning, you can plan and roll-up costs for buckets of portfolio items. This planning refers to financial categories, groups, and views, which you can freely define in SAP Portfolio and Project Management.

Costs on project level can only be transferred to a portfolio item using the integration to the cost collector, for example an SAP Project System (PS) project. It is not possible to transfer costs from the calculation in SAP Project Management projects, as this calculation is based on the calculation in the cost collector as well. The cost collectors are created in SAP S/4HANA Controlling, not using categories and groups, but cost elements, cost centers and activity types. For this reason, the controlling data has to be matched to the financial categories and groups in the configuration in SAP Portfolio and Project Management.

Alternatively, it is also possible to derive the costing data from the capacity data using the capacity views and the cost/revenue rates or from the staffing data of the roles and the costing rate from the roles.

Actual costs can only be transferred from the cost collector and the actual costs posted to it via financial activities, such as time recordings in the cross-application time sheet (CATS).