Planning Resources with Networks

Thomas, Hybrid Machinery's IT manager, discusses with James, who works as a project planner at the same company, the progress of the logistics project.

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

The SAP Project System (SAP 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.

Once you have created capacity requirements, you can enter workforce planning. Using workforce planning, you can distribute work among employees. This means that 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).

Not all activities in a project can be carried out by the company's own employees. The reason might be that the required qualification is not available. Another reason might be that all of the internal resources are fully utilized or that they are overqualified for the task.

In this case the required project work can be outsourced to external suppliers using purchasing documents.

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.