Understanding the Business Process Steps, Apps, and Roles, for Managing Resources in Standard SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Decentralized Staffing is carried out entirely within the SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution within the Plan Customer Projects app as part of scope item J11. It's the default staffing method.

The process is as follows:

• Role is planned on the customer / internal project, in terms of
  • Role (for example senior consultant)

    Team roles are activity types setup with the cost center category C (Professional Service) in the master data. A configuration expert must use the configuration activity Map Resources to Resource Types to assign such activity types to the resource type 0ACT.

  • Effort (for example 160 hours)

    The distribution of the effort can be defined by clicking the pencil icon next to the Effort box. By default, the effort will be distributed evenly over the current & future months of the work package.

    Note

    Distribution is only possible by month.
  • Service Organization (for example US Service Organization) – Optional
  • Skills (for example Artificial Intelligence) – Optional

    Skills are free text entry but previous entries are provided as options as the user types the desired skill to minimize redundant entries.

  • Staffing Instructions (for example Internal employees only) - Optional

    This is a free text box allowing up to 1000 characters.

• A resource search is carried out for staffed resources. Search results can be filtered.
• A resource is selected

  If multiple resources are selected, the role will be multiplied by that number of resources – that is only one resource may be staffed to a role via this method.

• The role is staffed

  The Confirm toggle must be set to Yes to finalize the assignment.

In order to carry out the service and material procurement processes described above, certain business catalogues must be assigned to the user’s Business Role (please see section on finding and allocating business roles in Unit 1 - Introducing SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, Professional Services). 

For the service and material procurement processes, the necessary business roles are: 

You can use this app to manage customer projects for which you are responsible. This app allows you to search for projects, copy existing projects, and edit your projects to plan work packages, efforts, resources, and billing, recalculate cost and revenue, and analyze financial KPIs (key performance indicators).

You use roles to plan the profiles required to fulfill the scope of work planned in a work package. Once this is done, you staff people from your internal and external workforce. This role planning can be carried out on either the Team tab or the Work Packages tab by clicking into the work package.

To plan a team resource, follow these steps:

1. Choose a work package to add the team resource.
2. Choose Add Team Role to create a new entry.
3. Select a role and enter the effort required.
4. Choose Add. The new entry is displayed at the top of the list. On saving the changes, the new entry moves to the end of the list.
5. Select the delivery organization for the resource and specify the skills as needed, to help you find a suitable match. You may enter up to five skills.
6. Select a work item if necessary.
7. Maintain staffing instructions as needed, to help the resource manager find the right resource.
8. Use Billing Control Category to decide if the resource is billable or not.
9. Choose Add Resource to add a team resource to the role. You can search for a resource using the name of the person, the role name, or skills.
10. You can also use the Add Role and Add Resource options in the Team tab to add roles and resources to a work package.
11. Confirm the staffing of resources when the project stage is set to In Execution stage. This confirmation results in staffing the resource as per their availability for the work package.

You can search for a resource using the person's name, role name, or skills. You can also use the following filters to refine the search:

• Delivery Organization

  If intercompany restrictions are maintained, then only the relevant delivery organization IDs are displayed here based on intercompany check.

• Cost Center
• Include External Workers
• Company Code

  If no delivery organization is maintained in the resource plan, the company code of the project is selected here by default.

• Service Cost Level

In the search results you can view the following details of the person:

• Name, role name, photo, skills, and employment type. You can also view the previous roles of the person, if any.
• Availability based on employments within the duration of the work package, where each employment is also indicated by its corresponding cost center. In the Team tab availability is calculated based on the duration of the project.

  The search result also indicates whether the employment would end before the end of the work package.

• Availability per month (in hours or days), for the calendar year.
  Note

  Availability is calculated based on the working hours per week defined for the person and staffing in other projects. If advanced resource management has been activated, the availability is based on the daily working hours maintained for the person.
• You can view additional details of the person such as contact details, employment details, and project assignments in the employee fact sheet that you can access by choosing the name of the person.

You can customize the search results using the Settings option.

You can use this app to manage internal projects for which you are the responsible project manager. This app allows you to search for projects, copy existing projects, and edit your projects to plan work packages, efforts, resources, and recalculate cost.

You use roles to plan the profiles required to fulfil the scope of work planned in a work package. Once this is done, you staff people from your internal and external workforce. This role planning can be carried out on either the Team tab or the Work Packages tab by clicking into the work package.

To plan a team resource, follow these steps:

1. Choose a work package to add the team resource.
2. Choose Add Team Role to create a new entry.
3. Select a role and enter the effort required.
4. Choose Add. The new entry is displayed at the top of the list. On saving the changes, the new entry moves to the end of the list.
5. Select the delivery organization for the resource and specify the skills as needed, to help you find a suitable match. You may enter up to five skills.
6. Select a work item if necessary.
7. Maintain staffing instructions as needed, to help the resource manager find the right resource.
8. Use Billing Control Category to decide if the resource is billable or not.
9. Choose Add Resource to add a team resource to the role. You can search for a resource using the name of the person, the role name, or skills.

   You can also use the Add Role and Add Resource options in the Team tab to add roles and resources to a work package.

10. Confirm the staffing of resources when the project stage is set to In Execution stage. This confirmation results in staffing the resource as per their availability for the work package.

You can search for a resource using the person's name, role name, or skills. You can also use the following filters to refine the search:

• Delivery Organization

  If intercompany restrictions are maintained, then only the relevant delivery organization IDs are displayed here based on intercompany check.

• Cost Center
• Include External Workers
• Company Code

  If no delivery organization is maintained in the resource plan, the company code of the project is selected here by default.

• Service Cost Level

In the search results you can view the following details of the person:

• Name, role name, photo, skills, and employment type. You can also view the previous roles of the person, if any.
• Availability based on employments within the duration of the work package, where each employment is also indicated by its corresponding cost center. In the Team tab availability is calculated based on the duration of the project.

  The search result also indicates whether the employment would end before the end of the work package.

• Availability per month (in hours or days), for the calendar year.
  Note

  Availability is calculated based on the working hours per week defined for the person, and staffing in other projects. If advanced resource management has been activated, the availability is based on the daily working hours maintained for the person.

• You can view additional details of the person such as contact details, employment details, and project assignments in the employee fact sheet that you can access by choosing the name of the person.

You can customize the search results using the Settings option.

With this app project managers can view and analyze the staffing situations in projects for which they are responsible. You can view information about resource requests, whether staffing has been fulfilled, the resources assigned to a request, the distribution of planned and staffed effort across months, and the cost.

With this app, you can create and update workers (employees and contingent workers), including work agreements, and change employment situations. It is with this app that employee’s skills tags can be updated directly.