Understanding Project Management in SAP S/4HANA

SAP offers several products for managing projects, all with different intended use cases. All products related to project and portfolio management belong to the umbrella term SAP Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management.

After discussing the different options for managing projects in SAP S/4HANA, John and Sarah agree with Thomas (the IT manager of Hybrid Development) to use SAP Portfolio and Project Management to build their projects and handle their project proposals. Sarah agrees to use SAP Financial Project Control in SAP Project System (PS) for the calculation of planned and the collection of actual costs.

In this lesson you will make yourself familiar with the benefits that SAP Portfolio and Project Management offers that led to the decision of Hybrid Development to use SAP Portfolio and Project Management.

SAP Portfolio and Project Management is mainly related to the research and development area of SAP S/4HANA focusing on implementation and development projects.

It supports multiple scenarios.

Some remarks about the above scenarios:

• You might want to design and develop new products. A development process involves many parties, stakeholders, developers, and planners. Project and resource management is therefore essential.
• You might also evaluate different implementation options for a new software module or might consider to develop your own application. Whereas the development process itself could be mapped in an SAP Enterprise Project and Portfolio Management project, the staffing is greatly supported by Resource Management, whereas Portfolio Management enables you to analyze and compare different approaches in terms of costs, budget, success, and risks.
• You may also want to implement another module in SAP S/4HANA or roll-out your solution to other company locations.

SAP Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management can support a company in all of these activities.

SAP Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management as part of SAP S/4HANA offers you the following advantages:

• Immediate access to all aspects of your project
• Real-time project analysis
• Integrated system with single source of truth
• Integration to other business functions
• High interactivity by using the role-based SAP Fiori UX and connecting all project participants (internally and externally).

SAP EPPM offers a variety of applications and tools to enable successful projects. With the integration of all these applications in the same platform, transactional costs are low and applications can work together seamlessly and exchange data in a fast and reliable way. Using one platform also minimizes the need to have redundant data in different systems.

A simplified version of the object structure for a portfolio as used in SAP Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management (EPPM) looks like this:

The hierarchy and structure of a portfolio consists of portfolio buckets. So called portfolio items are assigned to these portfolio buckets. They represent one (possible) project or portfolio initiative that contains several (possible) related projects. Detailed cost and resource planning is carried out on (PPM) project level and (PS) cost project level. All of the objects are covered in more detail later in this training course.

SAP Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management can be used in several system environments. As all SAP Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management applications are part of SAP S/4HANA, they can be used in every SAP S/4HANA installation, be it SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition or SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition. However: the features and functions differ from option to option and release to release.