Recording actual time on PPM projects

[Former Member]

Hi Folks,

We have requirement to record actual time against project tasks. I do understand that the standard SAP solution to do this is to use CATS, however, for our scenario using CATS is going to exponentially complicate our solution for these reasons.

1. Our requirement is simple, we want a person assigned to task to record actually time spent on tasks on a daily/weekly basis. There is no requirement to calculate actual internal resource costs and no requirement to post to financials, so this is purely from a resource management perspective and all we want to know is how many hours people actually spent on project tasks on a daily basis.
2. We don't use SAP HR, so setting up CATS would mean we need to implement part of the HR module ("HR Mini Master) and do the HR integration.
3. We would also need to integrate CATS to PS or FI/CO which we don't want to do since we are not calculating costs.
4. To complicate things further, PPM is a global system, however, each region has their own local ERP back-end for financials (both SAP and non SAP)

So my question - has anybody figured out a way to do this without using CATS, either building custom "timesheet" functionality into PPM or any other mechanism.

Thanks,

Lashan

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Anytime you tried to explore SAP consulting solution for this requirement.

Apart from this I believe you can make resource as responsible person for the task he is assigned for. With this resource can see the task he is supposed to perform in his task dashboard. From this dashboard he can confirm actual hours and % completion against each task.May be you need to do some enhancement to show actual hours against allocated hours for resource management.

The biggest drawback with this process will be, you may not assign one task with multiple resources and resource and each resource needs to have access with PPM (at least task tab). You can overcome this drawback also, if you decide to further screen enhancement so that somebody like project lead or administrator books time for his team against tasks.

Regards,

Pramod

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks very much for your response Pramod. Yes, the standard task dashboard will work fine for us, the only issues is that when doing time confirmation for a given task, there is only 1 actual hours field. For example, if I spent 18 hours on a task, I need to have the ability to say, I spent 5 hours on Monday, 8 on Tuesday, 5 on Thursday and so on. We are seriously considering doing an enhancement to allow this type "timesheet" functionality, however, I was wondering if anybody else has already done this and/or knows of a better way.

You mentioned a SAP consulting solution, is there one already out there and do you have any info such as note number so I can refer the details?

[ravi_ekambaram · Accepted solution]

Hi Lashan,

Check the below consulting solutions for PPM with note details.

http://download.sap.com/SMIGlobal/download.epd?context=C79139271A4B90D6E2AFA11D9BEFE92C2C2F3C780AEA2...

http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/PLMCS/SAP+Portfolio+and+Project+Management+Webinars

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Lashan,

Once we created grid to enter resource allocation data and save it with respect to task. You can define your custom screen and add that as additional tab with tasks but its complete custom webdynpro development.

Pramod

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Ravi, the CS for time recording and approval dashboard seem to be pretty close to what we need.