Executing a Project

By assigning materials to activities, you plan the necessary material requirements for a project. In the SAP system, you must distinguish between stock items and non-stock items. The item category stock item is used for materials that are kept in stock (warehouse, project, or sales order stock). You create reservations for stock items.

Independent requirements (requirements for finished products, saleable assemblies, trading goods, and spare parts) trigger requirements planning. To cover the requirements, you determine order quantities and dates and schedule the corresponding procurement elements. The procurement element for requirements planning is a planned order and, for external procurement, a purchase requisition.

In addition, you determine the dependent requirements for materials produced in-house (in other words, the quantity of components required to manufacture a finished product or assembly) by exploding the Bill of Material (BOM). You can create planned orders at each BOM level to cover requirements when a material shortage occurs.

After the quantities and dates are planned in requirements planning, you convert these planned procurement elements to exact procurement elements. For production, this element is the production order, and for external procurement, this element is the purchase order.

A purchase requisition that is generated for a project results in a purchase requisition commitment for the account assignment object (activity or Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) element).

When the purchase requisition is converted into a purchase order, this results in a purchase order commitment for the account assignment object (this object is a different value type than purchase requisition commitments).

Depending on the account assignment category of the purchase order, you can post the actual costs upon the receipt of the goods or their invoice (valuated or nonvaluated goods receipt). Based on the account assignment, the system passes the relevant documents concerning goods movement on to the network activity or WBS elements.

As an alternative to having the network generate the purchase requisitions automatically, you can also manually create purchase requisitions and purchase orders and assign them to WBS elements.

The figure shows business transactions that establish a connection to WBS elements or activities by using an assignment. By assigning the appropriate documents, the resulting commitment or actual costs are posted directly to a WBS element or the network or activity.

During the project planning phase, these costs were planned accordingly.

Examples of costs that you can plan include the following:

• Costs for purchase requisitions, purchase orders, and goods receipts at the network or activity level, using externally processed activities, service activities, or material components that are procured directly
• Stock withdrawn from the warehouse using the appropriate stock items
• Invoices posted by using cost activities and costs arising as a result of confirmations by using internally processed activities

Actual costs and revenues arising from purchase requisitions, purchase orders, goods receipts, activity allocations, and invoices for WBS elements match the values of the primary costs, activity input, and revenue planning data for the WBS.