| Putting Owners back in Charge with SAP |
| Written by Berthold Kastel | |
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Enterprise project owners use SAP as their core business backbone system. Their projects are complex since they involve integrated business processes, large project structures, or multiple locations and systems. The typical challenge for such organizations is that they need standards and consistently defined processes so that they can reap benefits of scale and allow for realistic management.
In such a context it does not make sense to completely discard SAP as a project management tool. Program or asset owners need to be ensured that they can control costs and have a general but realistic idea of the status of the project. They approve budgets, review planned versus actual versus budgeted costs and check on the progress at a minimum by verifying the completion of milestones. This is important since such data is being used to verify that they correctly pay whoever manages and completes the project deliverables. Vice versa, released and paid amounts should be charged as committed or actuals charges to the projects. All these functions benefit from a strong integration with other similar backend processes. Therefore, even if the actual project ownership rests with a separate department or with a general contractor, I strongly recommend using SAP as the sole project management tool for all structure, budget, purchasing, sales and production functions. This provides the system guidance needed and simplifies processes for the enterprise-level end users by setting standards and drawing automatically on full system integration to key corporate business functions. In the context of the "owner" function of enterprise project management, it actually is misleading to label 'best-of-breed' project management software as "Enterprise" (like Primavera Enterprise or Microsoft Enterprise Project Management). In the big picture, they are mere niche solutions for almost all business situations. Only SAP or similar systems that cover comprehensively all core business functions are true enterprise systems. These often is seen when looking at financial aspects, but also going beyond such. For example:
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