Kieron Dowling - SAP® Project System Handbook

Kieron N. Dowling

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Dedicated with love to my children: Damien, Fiona, and Tia.

After some years as a tea, tobacco, and dairy farmer in Africa and the UK, Kieron Dowlings IT background has spanned in excess of 25 years in Zambia, Australia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Europe. Beginning in the days of punch-cards and paper-tape, throughout his career he has worked with IBM mainframes, progressing to the successful design of medical, agricultural, real-estate, and myriad other packages for the early PC market of the 80s and 90s. He has two Australian Design Awards for his Medical and Dental software. SAP was the natural progression, and today he has over 13 years PS and IM experience under his belt as he continues to service the Oil, Engineering, Manufacturing, Mining, and most other high-end business disciplines. He is also the author of several fiction thrillers. He lives in Rome, Italy.

SAP, naturally. Who have rekindled the professional lives of many a gifted dinosaur after the gradual decline of the mainframe! Thanks to Rettitiswarane Velayoudam for his contribution to the section on Project Progress under Tips and Tricks. I would also like to thank the staff of McGraw-Hill whose professional approach has made this possible.

This guide provides a concise reference to the most important aspects of the SAP R/3 PS module. Project System (PS) equates to anything that is project-oriented and has a life cycle. Apart from providing detailed background information about the features of PS, this guide includes useful reference information such as Transaction Codes, Report lists, Tables, and Fieldsvital when youre offline and need to refresh your memory.

One of the hardest things to communicate to those trying to implement business requirements in PS is the various methods by which things can be done. Questions range from How does PS work? to How can I distribute my planned costs over five years all in one go? to Why cant I see my Planned Costs? Reading this book should lead you in the right direction. It has been developed with a top-down approach, starting with the big picture and drilling down to detail as you progress.

In business, just about everything can be viewed as a Project. The decision to use PS depends on the degree of complexity and functionality desired. SAP R/3 has other modules that offer objects capable of emulating a projectProduction Planning, Sales & Distribution, Controlling with Internal Orders, and Customer Services, to name a few. But none has the depth of structure, integration, and complexity available in PS.

What exactly is PS? It is a repository for planning, collecting, and generating costs and revenue via a structure that truly represents what you are doing over a period of time. How simple is that? As simple or complex as you want it to be.

If it has a start, a middle, and an endits probably a project.

Everything associated with a project revolves around what SAP terms Work Breakdown Structures (WBSs) and Networks. These are the objects that do all the work and carry information about what the project will do. They can trigger events, schedule work, and generate demands for materials and services required to carry out the project.