Scheduling Networks

After Lisa, who works as a sales representative at Hybrid Machinery, has created the sales order, the project structure has been created automatically. It includes the network with all of its activities.

James, who works as a project planner at the same company, now checks the project schedule and investigates the transfer of dates from network activities to the network header and the WBS elements, to which the network activities are assigned.

A Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) with assigned networks and activities can be scheduled top-down or bottom-up. In top-down scheduling you first define the basic dates for the WBS elements manually. This might be the case if these dates are determined externally and are fixed for the project.

Usually in a logistics project bottom-up scheduling is used instead. Here, the network activities are scheduled first and the scheduled dates are transferred to the network header and the WBS element an activity is assigned to. Then the basic dates of the network header and WBS element can be derived automatically.

Networks are always scheduled forwards and backwards. The scheduling type in the scheduling parameters specifies the direction in which you begin the scheduling. The system determines the earliest dates of the activities by means of forward scheduling, and the latest dates by means of backward scheduling. The difference between the earliest and the latest dates of an activity are referred to as floats. Floats can be positive, zero, or negative. If the float of an activity is zero or negative, the activity in question is critical.

Relationships determine the chronological sequence of the individual activities in a network. You can enter additional data (such as a time interval or reference to a particular factory calendar) in the detail screen for each relationship.

The system is able to determine to sequence of network activities using relationships.

Besides the graphical planning board, SAP Project System (PS) offers a new SAP UI5 app for checking project schedules. With this app, you can view the hierarchy of the project objects and monitor their time lines. The chart area of the screen allows you to display different set of dates in a Gantt representation while displaying the project tree with detailed information in the table area.

The application offers the following key features:

• Display the project tree in the table view with a configurable set of attributes.
• Specify the default hierarchy level to be exploded on opening a project.
• Choose and display date information in the chart area, such as basic, actual and forecast dates.
• Display relationships within networks or plant maintenance orders.
• Open the side panel with detailed information about the selected object.
• Apply custom coloring for shapes in the Gantt chart area (using the UI Theme Designer).
• Navigate to relevant object pages and other applications.
• Save the preferred configuration and use it for the next run.

Alternatively to the network graphic overview in the Project Builder, you can use this app to display network activities and their relationships as an interactive graph. The app allows you to identify critical activities, their dependencies, confirmation status, and display detailed information for selected objects.

The application offers the following key features:

• Display network activities for a selected project, network, or WBS element and their relationships in a graph view.
• Group activities by network or WBS element.
• Detect loops.
• Navigate by successors and predecessors.
• Highlight activities by selected criteria.
• Search for activities.
• Display detailed information for selected objects.
• Navigate to related apps to view details of networks, network activities, WBS elements.
• Open an overview of objects assigned to the network activity: milestones, sub-networks, activity elements, material components.
• Add and edit attributes of the network activity, including assigned objects, which are shown in the graph node in the configuration of the system.
• Switch between different view types.