Planning Resources with Networks

James is a project planner at Hybrid Machinery. Manuel is responsible for capacity planning and resource and material procurement. They are discussing the management of project resources.

You can use activities in a network to plan the resources required for a project.

The SAP Project System (PS) distinguishes between the following types of activities:

• Internally processed activity

  Defines the work to be carried out by machines or people. You can evaluate the capacities of the various work centers involved, reschedule these capacities as necessary, and distribute work among employees.

• Externally processed activity

  Defines activities that are required from external resources like vendors and subcontractors. External processing is carried out by the purchasing department.

• Service activity

  A service activity is also used to procure services externally. It is defined by service specifications and value limits that can be rendered by the service provider. Service processing includes maintenance of service entry sheets. Service processing is carried out by the purchasing department.

James is a project planner at Hybrid Machinery. Manuel is partly responsible for capacity planning. They discuss the required planning activities for the internal workforce.

"After the work has been completed, the work center where the work was executed out is available again for other tasks."

Once you have created capacity requirements, you can enter workforce planning. Using workforce planning, you can distribute work among employees, that is, you can assign persons to activities. You can also schedule personnel for an activity. Project and work center views are available to help you distribute work among employees. In both views, you can assign persons to activities and access various reference data, such as the availability of a person from Human Capital Management (HCM).

James is a project planner at Hybrid Machinery. Manuel is responsible for project procurement. They discuss the required planning activities for the external suppliers.

Service procurement via purchasing is mapped in networks by means of the following two activity types:

• Externally processed activity
• Service activity

For example, if you commission an engineering office to design a machine, you can create an externally processed activity. When you create an activity such as this, a purchase requisition that is processed further in purchasing is automatically created. You can use data from purchasing for external processing (a purchasing info record that contains prices and delivery times for external processing).

A service activity can contain a hierarchy of planned services to be purchased, and value limits for unplanned services. A service activity triggers a similar purchasing process as an externally processed activity. However, there is no goods receipt for services. Instead of a goods receipt, a service entry sheet is used. The purchasing process for a service activity involves two steps, namely, entering in of the service and acceptance of the service.