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.

Internally processed activities are used to plan work that is to be carried out within your company.

You must define additional data for internally processed activities so the system can create capacity requirements and calculate costs for the following:

• Work center

  A work center is the place where an activity is carried out or work output is produced. A work center contains the scheduling and capacity data required for scheduling and capacity planning. A work center also contains data for costing.

• Work

  Work is the planned output of machines or personnel to complete an activity.

• Duration

  The duration specifies for how long an activity lasts.

• Activity type

  The activity type (and the cost center derived from the work center) specify a price for calculating the planned costs of an activity.

You can determine how much of the work center capacity is used for the activities. If necessary, you can use the Project Planning Board to level capacities. When you confirm activities during the project execution phase, you enter actual dates.

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).