Planning Capacity Values

Sarah already wants to calculate the required resources for the upcoming projects - this will give her and John, the project manager, a better overview on the required resources ahead of time. For this reason Sarah also carries out capacity planning after having consulted with John and other stakeholders and taking their experiences into account. In the following lessons you will be made familiar with such a capacity planning process.

In SAP Portfolio and Project Management you face a number of constraints. You must complete items and projects on time and within budget. However, capacity demand and resource allocation have an impact on your item. Capacity planning can be crucial for an item when resources are limited. Based on capacity data, you may decide which product of your portfolio item is required to be updated, which project is required to be terminated, or in which product you want to invest.

SAP Portfolio Management uses views, categories, and groups for financial and capacity planning.

• Views represent the planning area and planning option. For example, you can define a view for your capacity planning on bucket level, and additional views to evaluate the capacity planning on project level and the actual allocation from the project or the cost collector.
• Categories represent the type of capacity value, for example requirements for project leads, developers, or testers.
• Groups can be used to divide the categories further, for example in ABAP and WebUI developers.

Manual capacity planning can be carried out on bucket level or item level.

Once categories, groups, and views are predefined, you can start capacity planning. The figure Manual Capacity Planning demonstrates manual capacity planning for a portfolio item. In this case, the Forecast view is predefined for manual planning. Thus, you can enter future capacity demand for all periods within the planning interval.

You can define your own views for planning the views shown above are only example views - views, categories, and groups can be adapted to your needs. You can use distribution functions to enter capacity planning data. The distribution functions allow you to distribute values across several periods.

As additional information, you can define portfolio buckets as sponsors by default for the various capacity groups. In this way, you can document that another portfolio bucket has made resources available for execution.

In Portfolio Management, you define portfolios as hierarchies built from different levels of buckets (where items are assigned to the lowest level buckets). Capacity data planned at the level of items can be rolled up to the superior bucket. For example, you manually enter the capacity planning view Forecasted Demand for an item. The Forecasted Demand view is rolled up to the respective view of the bucket. You cannot manually change the Forecasted Demand view for the bucket.

A view is either rolled up to the bucket or maintained manually. A roll-up of planning data is possible from an item to a superior bucket. A roll-up is also possible from a bucket to a superior bucket. If you make use of initiatives, a roll-up is possible from an initiative item to a superior initiative to a superior bucket. Details of the roll-up process are set up in the configuration of views.

In SAP Portfolio Management, capacity planning data is entered manually, is rolled up, or is calculated by integration of capacity planning of subordinate objects (for example, a portfolio project that is assigned to a portfolio item). The demand planning based on the roles of a project can be integrated with a capacity planning view of the superior item.

Integration can be enabled for items only. Buckets can only be planned directly in SAP Portfolio Management.

In addition to roles and allocation of assigned projects, you can integrate cost planning data, budget, actual cost, and commitments for a number of SAP S/4HANA cost objects. The figure Capacity Planning by Integration shows typical objects assigned to portfolio items. For example, based on confirmations of working hours of an assigned internal order, you can calculate the Actual view in the capacity planning of an item.