Project Controls plays a crucial role in managing Engineering or Construction projects. A comparison of plan and actual with respect to progress and cost helps to identify potential problems in a timely manner so that corrective actions can be taken. A missing effective project controlling leads to bad surprises, project cost-overruns and project delays.
Practically every organization that manages large projects has a certain history of projects that went terribly wrong. Just by looking at the newspapers you can always find examples of public infrastructure projects with large cost over-runs or delays, in Germany for example the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg or the Berlin Airport.
The reasons for project failure can be manifold. But one important topic is typically a missing system support for automated and real-time Project Controls. Today, many companies use some specialized applications or even Excel sheets to do project controlling. Typically, these applications are not at all or only poorly integrated with the backbone Enterprise Management System which is the system of record for all the actual costs. Such an approach leads to many challenges:
- There is no “single version of the truth” because Project Controllers and Corporate Financial Controllers look at different data
- There are delays in reporting due to periodic synchronization and manual reconciliation
- Real-time forecasting is not possible
To overcome these challenges and to help companies to make their project success better predictable and repeatable SAP offers SAP Commercial Project Management. Fully integrated with SAP S/4HANA or SAP ERP this solution provides many capabilities that help to better manage engineering or construction projects. Among them there are functions for project cost planning and forecasting as well as project change management. Leading engineering and construction firms are embracing this functionality for a competitive advantage.
At this year’s
SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference you can listen to the stories of customers that have implemented SAP Commercial Project Management:
If you want to get the latest information on new innovations for SAP Commercial Project Management for SAP S/4HANA please visit the
SAP Innovation Discovery Platform. Under this
link you can find for example the enhancements released in March 2017.
