Video: Portfolio and Project Management for Capital Expenditure Projects

SAP has recently released a new video that reviews some of the capabilities of the EPPM solution as it relates to Capex projects.  Here’s the link:  SAP Video: Portfolio and Project Management for Capital Expenditure Projects

The video opens up by trying to correlate a company’s burden of handling their active portfolios with that of a marching band.  As someone who was in marching band all the way through college (come at me!) I can say that marching band is way easier!  The biggest difference being that it’s not nearly as political, nor does a marching band feature groups with competing interests.  An enterprise-wide global multi-year IT project has both.  Projects are way harder but it’s a good attempt on SAP’s part.  After all, this is just a corporate sales video.

After introducing SAP Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management for Capital Projects (quite the long title), they show the below dashboard.  It’s showing aggregate values for a number of projects.  You can filter in/out individual projects or do it based on some of the project characteristics such as priority and risk.  In terms of the displayed key figures and models, I particularly like the NPV Calculation in the bottom right hand corner.  It strikes me as more useful than the other ones.

The narrator says that the solution provides an “end-to-end operating platform that enables you to spend the right money, on the right projects, at the right time.”

The key question is what tool is doing this?  My guess is that it’s either S/4HANA Analytics Cloud (SAC) or Fiori, or both.  But it’s definitely not directly in S/4HANA.

The video then segues into Optimizing Project Allocation.  Here they talk about how new project requests, or appropriation requests, are generated.  Basic information can be entered so that the request is routed appropriately within the organization.  This is similar but a much scaled down version of how an Appropriation Request gets created in Investment Management.

The next image shows more of the details that I typically see in IM or PPM.

There is capability to add more qualitative information in the form of a questionnaire.  Again, this can be done in IM and PPM.

Next we get to see a list of portfolio items.  This is super useful and we don’t get this kind of visual display in either Project Systems or IM in S/4HANA. 

Next, we finally get to a project hierarchy report.  This is showing the planned values per period against the hierarchy and I assume there is some drilldown capability to the master record or project line items.

The video then shows some actual costs.  There’s a lot that I like here… the project hierarchy, various cost value types, a cost status tracker, and all nicely laid out on a single screen.

Lastly, since all capital projects eventually have to settle to an asset, they show the below list of assets.  But, this isn’t a settlement structure/overview, it’s just an asset list from the FI-AA module which is a bit misleading.  Instead, they should show the asset assignment to the WBS in my opinion.

Anyway… enough with my review.  Hit the link below to view it yourself.

SAP Video: Portfolio and Project Management for Capital Expenditure Projects