SAP Business One for Project Planning

If you operate a project driven company, the combination of SAP Business One and IA Project planning software will create your perfect solution.

It will even allow you to manage a mix of trade, service and project planning all through one easy to use system.

IA Project will help you with:

Project Planning – The handy Gantt charts will always give you a real-time view of capacity and materials. Plus you can link deliveries directly to a project for an accurate view of where you are.

Capacity Planning – The easy to interpret graphs help to make capacity planning simple! The drag & drop function means you can add activities or hours to the project plan and allocate the necessary employees and machines.

Quotation Controls & Sales – You’ll be able to streamline your sales process thanks to easier quoting and project management. So, you can make sure quotes are accurate and achievable by seeing how it will impact machines and labour.

Job Costing – You’ll have direct access to projected margin, planned-v-actual budgets as well as work in progress. Furthermore, you can drill-down into activities, material and labour so you’ll always have an accurate view of the project, progress and work in progress.

Time Registration – You can book direct and indirect hours straight into time sheets that roll-up to the project costing and will be shown on Gantt charts. And to make life even easier the data can even be input through mobile devices on the shop-floor to save time.

Procurement & Inventory – Thanks to comprehensive material planning and procurement you can link materials directly to project activities or milestones. This means you can provide just-in-time purchasing, and even make use of project-based procurement and multiple warehouses.

Accounting & Invoicing – You can link invoices to milestones, activities or even to a scheduled date to help you keep on top of things.

Financial Administration – The system will integrate all the relevant information so you can male full use of the flexible and extensive reporting.

CRM – With the robust and easy to use opportunity management system your sales, marketing and service teams will excel. Because they’ll have all the quotes, orders and other relevant information instantly available from within the single system.

Step 1: Define & Plan the project

You can create new projects from scratch, or easily copy them over from templates or other projects. This means you can simply copy previous hours, materials, planning constraints, billing-scheme and attachments. And then adjust the hours, materials and prices to quickly create an overall project budget. This means that with one click you can view and plan your new project with a real-time interactive Gantt chart. Plus, you can instantly see any constraints and dependencies, as well as material requirements, labour, milestones, invoicing and delivery dates. So when you overlay your project plan with your actual capacity you can ensure everything is available to create a reliable plan.

Step 2: Price Your Project

After you’ve developed your budget you can quickly price and create quotes for your project by using flexible price lists in SAP Business One. Or, you can simply add an up-lift margin to material and labour costs for the overall project cost. So then you can automatically generate a quote and create a sales order.

Step 3: Work Assignment

The drag and drop planning screen will help you to easily and quickly allocate project activities to departments, sub-departments, machines and people. And what’s more it will all be fully customised to your company. So this means you’ll have a clear and accurate insight into your resource use that you can create the  work orders needed from.

Step 4: Material Management

You’ll be able to plan your material requirements on a project basis. In fact, any project can include individual material components and pre-defined BOMs, so you can create an adjustable project BOM. Plus, materials can be assigned to specific project activities to enable just-in-time planning and purchasing. Furthermore you can create material recommendations for a single project or combine multiple projects. And with all your material requirements you’ll be able to see the PO’s and production orders in an interactive Gantt chart.

Step 5: Time Registration

You can record and book time by project, activity and work type, and remote users can even input their time via a web browser. So, time can be approved and booked to a project where it will immediately show up as “actual” hours in the project budget. Plus, actual booked hours are also immediately displayed in the project Gantt chart.

Step 6: Project Invoicing & Financial Control

And finally, you can establish a billing method for the project with down payments, percentage of completion, milestone, or time & materials. This means invoices can be tied to the completion of a project activity, a milestone or on a specific date. So you can ensure your invoices are generated to increase your on-time collections. Every project has a screen to show Budget v Actual and Work-in-Process to keep track of any financial changes to a project. So, for each activity and phase you have complete insight into planned and actual costs, project margin, work in progress and budget. This means you’ll always have up-to-date control over the financial health of your projects and your project margin!

Sell faster:

• Fast estimating – Create new projects from templates or by copying prior projects.
• Quick Pricing – Quickly develop a cost budget and selling price.
• Accurate estimating – Labour and material costs are accurately and quickly reflected in every project.

Planning:

• Gantt chart integration – Plan your new project with a real-time interactive Gantt chart showing all constraints and dependencies, combined with material requirements, labour, milestones, invoicing and delivery dates.
• Capacity planning – Customise your departments, labour and machines to display your real-time capacity. Overlay your project plan with your department capacity to ensure you have resources available.
• Accurate available-to-promise – Project planning integrated with capacity planning so available-to-promise can be quickly and reliably determined.
• Just-in-time material planning – Schedule material requirements to specific activities and phases of the project plan. Purchase and production can be ordered just in time.
• Reliable deliveries – Effective project planning fully integrated with material planning and capacity ensures that projects are completed and delivered on time.

Keep Control:

• Accurate budget v actual – Always have a clear idea of where you are with costs for a project.
• Increasing project margins – Accurate estimating, real-time visibility into costs, combined with integrated project & capacity planning ensures that project margins remain healthy and variances can be quickly identified.
• Milestone billing – Schedule invoicing to coincide with the completion of a project phase or activity. Down payments, time & materials, or percentage of completion invoicing. Web-based labour reporting Labour hours can be recording by project activity, and input by local computer or by a web browser for remote users.
• Improving quality – Creating projects from templates reinforces best practices. Copy prior projects for continuous improvement. Accurate project & capacity planning ensures projects are well managed, on-time and profitable.