SAP Business One for Project Planning

Do you run a project driven company?

If so, then the combination of SAP Business One and IA Project is the perfect solution to the problems you face.

With IA Project you’ll be able to manage a mix of trade, service and project planning all through one easy to use system.

Project Planning

With the handy Gantt charts you’ll always have a real-time view of capacity and materials. And, you can even link deliveries straight to a project for a 100% accurate view of where you are.

Capacity Planning

Thanks to easy to interpret graphs you’ll find that capacity planning becomes simple! By simply dragging & dropping activities or hours to the project plan you’ll be able to alter the project plan. As well as also being able to allocate the necessary employees and machines.

Quotation Controls & Sales

Plus, thanks to easier quoting and project management you can streamline your sales processes. So, as well as making sure quotes are accurate and achievable you can also see how changes will impact machines and labour.

Job Costing

IA Project will give you direct access to projected margins, planned-v-actual budgets as well as work in progress. And because you can drill-down into activities, material and labour you’ll always have an accurate view of the project, current situation and work to be carried out.

Time Registration

Your life will be made much easier as direct and in-direct time is input through mobile devices on the shop-floor.

Procurement & Inventory

You’ll be able to link materials directly to project activities or milestones thanks to the comprehensive material planning and procurement functions. So you can carry out just-in-time purchasing, as well as make use of project-based procurement and multiple warehouses.

Accounting & Invoicing

By linking invoices to milestones, activities or even to a scheduled date you’ll be able to keep on top of project billing.

Financial Administration

You can male full use of the flexible and extensive reporting as the system automatically integrates all the relevant information.

CRM

With all the quotes, orders and other relevant information instantly available your sales, marketing and service teams can excel.

Step 1: Define & Plan the project

You can create new projects from scratch, or easily copy them over from other projects. So you can simply copy previous hours, materials, planning constraints, billing-scheme and attachments. And then quickly adjust it to 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, machines and people. And furthermore, 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

It’ll be possible to record and book time by project, activity and work type, and remote users can even input their time via a web browser. Which means time can be instantly approved and booked to a project as “actual” hours which are 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. Which 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. You’ll always have complete insight into planned and actual costs, project margin, work in progress and budget. So you’ll always have up-to-date control over the financial health of your projects and your project margin!

With IA Project you’ll sell quicker and easier:

• Fast estimating – By using templates or simply copying from previous projects you’ll be able to create estimates faster than ever before.
• Quick Pricing – You’ll be able to quickly develop a cost budget and selling price.
• Accurate estimating – Because labour and material costs are accurately worked out for every project your estimate will be more accurate than ever before.

IA Project will help you plan and visualise your entire project:

• Gantt chart integration – By using real-time interactive Gantt chart you’ll have a clear view of all the constraints and dependencies for your project. As well as the material requirements, labour, milestones, invoicing and delivery dates you need to keep control of.
• Capacity planning – You can customise your departments, labour and machines to show your actual capacity. And, by overlaying your project plan with your department capacity you’ll be able to make sure you always have the resources available.
• Accurate available-to-promise – Because you’ll always have a 100% accurate view of your entire project you’ll be confident when making promises to your customers.
• Just-in-time material planning – You’ll be able to schedule material requirements to specific activities and phases of the project plan. So, purchase and production can be ordered just in time.

Keep Control of your project with IA Project planning software:

• Accurate budget v actual – You’ll always have a real-time view of where you are with costs for a project. So you will always stay in control.
• Increasing project margins – With an accurate estimate and a clear view of costs, combined with project & capacity planning, you can ensure your project margins stay healthy. You can quickly pick up on any changes or issues to stop things escalating out of control.
• Milestone billing – You can schedule invoicing to coincide with the completion of a project phase or activity, such as, down payments, time & materials, or percentage of completion invoicing.
• Improving quality – Because you’ll be creating projects from templates or previous projects, you’ll reinforce best practices and  continuous improvement.

Contact us to discover how SAP Business One and IA Project Planning software will give you complete control of your projects.

We can show you how to create accurate estimates which are are based on capacity planning so your projects will be well managed, on-time and profitable.

Call 0114 299 9430, email or, request a callback and keep control with SAP Business One for project planning from Ochiba Business Solutions!