Enterprise Project Management + ERP Integration
Country-specific aspects of accounting and controlling
In this article Stavros Georgantzis describes the requirements posed by integrating a project management system (PMS) and ERP systems. It sets out the principal scenarios encountered in practice and analyses special factors that are of relevance to global companies. Both the article itself and the examples and illustrations presented herein refer primarily to the integration of products made by Microsoft (Microsoft Project Professional and Server) and SAP (SAP Enterprise Core Components / ECC), but they can be applied accordingly to other similar systems.
Objectives, requirements and scenarios
The main objective of integrating a PMS with an ERP system is to facilitate the exchange of cost- related information. Such information can include planned costs, planned work, revenues, budgets, hours worked, and actual costs.
Sometimes the focus is not only on expenses and costs but also on schedules. This is the case with maintenance projects scheduled in SAP Plant Maintenance (PM). Operational information can be exported to Microsoft Project and then subjected to detailed planning, the goal being to return the results of the scheduling and resource planning to the PM operations.
A similar situation can frequently be encountered in plant construction, whereby the planning and scheduling of material components can be controlled in Microsoft Project.
A further objective of integration is to enable the transfer of progress reports from the PMS to the ERP system. This situation is commonly observed in plant construction and in general throughout the construction industry. The progress information can then be used to compile earned value reports.
To enable the exchange of this data, it is necessary to ...
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