Allow­ing orga­ni­za­tions to cen­tral­ly man­age all their projects across dif­fer­ent depart­ments, from ini­tial plan­ning and fore­cast­ing to exe­cu­tion, mon­i­tor­ing, and clo­sure, the Enter­prise Port­fo­lio and Project Man­age­ment (EPPM) mod­ule with­in SAP S/4HANA is a com­pre­hen­sive tool for man­ag­ing projects at the port­fo­lio lev­el, pro­vid­ing a holis­tic view and enabling bet­ter decision-making. 

In a recent ASUG web­cast, Rena­to Zadro, Chief Solu­tion Expert in Enter­prise Port­fo­lio and Project Man­age­ment (EPPM) at SAP, unpacked how to effec­tive­ly lever­age SAP S/4HANA’s EPPM capa­bil­i­ties through cloud-based col­lab­o­ra­tion and AI func­tion­al­i­ty. Zadro illus­trat­ed how SAP Cloud for Projects and SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud can enhance project man­age­ment process­es while offer­ing a glimpse into the future of EPPM with SAP’s AI co-pilot, Joule.

Many cus­tomers rely on decou­pled solu­tions with data ​“dis­trib­uted across mul­ti­ple spread­sheets, project man­age­ment sched­ules, cost plan­ning, again, in spread­sheets, and so on,” said Zadro. These dis­parate process­es demand an inte­grat­ed approach to project man­age­ment. One is EPPM, a project man­age­ment suite that ​“cov­ers the entire project life­cy­cle from the port­fo­lio man­age­ment to finan­cial plan­ning, capac­i­ty plan­ning, sched­ul­ing, resource man­age­ment, and exe­cu­tion,” he said.

Tight­ly inte­grat­ed into S/4HANA, EPPM uni­fies finance, con­trol­ling, pro­cure­ment, and human resource man­age­ment process­es in a sin­gle plat­form. SAP also offers cloud solu­tions that enhance EPPM’s col­lab­o­ra­tion, plan­ning, and resource man­age­ment capabilities. 

Col­lab­o­ra­tive Project Man­age­ment and Informed Finan­cial Planning

With SAP Cloud for Projects, a pub­lic cloud solu­tion built on the SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form, orga­ni­za­tions can con­nect S/4HANA data with exter­nal project part­ners. ​“If you want to enhance your project infor­ma­tion with dig­i­tal twin infor­ma­tion, the col­lab­o­ra­tion and the facil­i­ta­tion of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion in a project can be actu­al­ly achieved with Cloud for Projects,” Zadro explained. 

This solu­tion allows users to import project sched­ules, share them with exter­nal part­ners, and lever­age 3D visu­al­iza­tion through BIM mod­els. These col­lab­o­ra­tors can be invit­ed to the plat­form, assigned project tasks, and ini­ti­ate issue res­o­lu­tions or change process­es direct­ly with­in the platform. 

Anoth­er com­po­nent of Cloud for Projects is resource man­age­ment, designed to stream­line the staffing process from resource requests to assign­ment and uti­liza­tion mon­i­tor­ing. Addi­tion­al­ly, it can read resource demand from SAP S/4HANA, pub­lic cloud edi­tion, and, with cus­tom code, from the pri­vate cloud edition. 

Among the solution’s stand­out fea­tures is AI-based intel­li­gent employ­ee-to-project match­ing, cur­rent­ly avail­able as a beta ver­sion. ​“With the intel­li­gent match­ing of employ­ees, we do not just match direct skills,” he explained. ​“We look for sim­i­lar skills that actu­al­ly may also be a good fit and then pro­pose this to the resource man­ag­er.” By ana­lyz­ing CVs and past project assign­ments to iden­ti­fy suit­able resources, this func­tion­al­i­ty can save around 15 – 30 min­utes per request. 

SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud now offers a con­tent pack­age that enables port­fo­lio and project man­agers to align bot­tom-up plan­ning requests with top-down bud­get plans. An intu­itive fron­tend makes it easy for users to main­tain detailed finan­cial plans. ​“It’s not required any­more to go to the pro­fes­sion­al user inter­face and then actu­al­ly do this type of plan­ning,” not­ed Zadro.

Dur­ing a typ­i­cal plan­ning process walk-through, he demon­strat­ed how project man­agers can cre­ate bud­get requests, which are then con­sol­i­dat­ed by bud­get man­agers and reviewed by port­fo­lio man­agers for top-down dis­tri­b­u­tion. By pro­vid­ing a com­pre­hen­sive view of actu­al costs, planned costs, and bud­gets, SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud facil­i­tates informed deci­sion-mak­ing and resource allocation. 

What’s Next: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence for EPPM

Look­ing ahead, SAP plans to intro­duce AI co-pilot Joule to EPPM func­tion­al­i­ty in SAP S/4HANA. ​“We want to use that to make the work faster for the users, because the AI can actu­al­ly under­stand the busi­ness and pro­vide rec­om­men­da­tions, sum­ma­riza­tion, and so on,” said Zadro, not­ing that AI will also help users get more intel­li­gent insights into their data and projects. 

Planned capa­bil­i­ties include nav­i­ga­tion­al skills, such as access­ing rel­e­vant pur­chas­ing doc­u­ments or chang­ing work-break­down-struc­ture (WBS) ele­ment sta­tus­es; con­text infor­ma­tion, like weath­er fore­casts for project launch days; and sum­ma­riza­tion skills, includ­ing gen­er­at­ing project sum­maries and email gen­er­a­tion. Zadro cau­tioned that plans can always change, so stay­ing up-to-date with devel­op­ments is essential. 

As orga­ni­za­tions seek to opti­mize their project man­age­ment process­es, the cloud-based col­lab­o­ra­tion and AI capa­bil­i­ties offered by Cloud for Projects, Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, and Joule’s inte­gra­tion with EPPM promise to pro­vide an even more com­pre­hen­sive solu­tion for stream­lin­ing oper­a­tions, improv­ing resource allo­ca­tion, and mak­ing data-dri­ven project man­age­ment decisions. 

For more, watch the full web­cast replay here.