What is SAP CPM?

Introduction to SAP
Commercial Project Management
DevWorkbench Monday March 3rd, 2014

In February of 2013, SAP announced the development of a new solution in the area of
customer project management. The integration of SD (Sales) and PS (Project System) is
possible in the SAP ERP system today, however many consultants agree that the
implementation of the project sales process is cumbersome and the end result does not
provide the necessary overview to get a firm grip on what’s actually going on in your
projects. Finally, SAP have recognized this deficiency and consequently SAP CPM was
released as Version 1.0 in 2013. It’s officially called CA-CPD because CPM is already taken
by the Corporate Performance Monitor; I will, however, use the term SAP CPM in this
article. SAP are selling it as the new solution for project based businesses; it’s provided as
an extension to the core SAP ERP system. Time to take a good, hard look at it and see what
it can do!

Why should you use SAP CPM / CA-CPD?

We’re currently seeing a shift in business structures throughout all industries. Project
related business services, according to SAP, make up approximately 20% of business
worldwide! This puts a lot of emphasis on companies’ ability for smooth and flexible
project execution, and that is where SAP CPM is supposed to help us. Three main challenges
are recognized in the field of commercial project management today:

 Low process transparency and poor employee productivity, due to missing and
distributed information
 Low efficiency and flexbility, resulting in long throughput times especially for
project changes
 High project failure rates and low profit margins

Of course, SAP claim to fix all that and provide us with more transparency through a unified
UI, better user experience, and therefore improve project profitability and process
efficiency as well as reduce risks. The target groups for the use of SAP CPM are project
leaders and managers as well as executives in the project organization.

The project lifecycle

Before we take a look at the SAP Commercial Project Management application itself, let’s
first discuss the model of a project lifecycle that constitutes the philosophy of SAP CPM.
That will make life easier later on when we actually look at the application itself, because
we’re clear about which parts of the project lifecycle can actually be performed in SAP CPM.
The typical project in SAP CPM has three major phases – Sell, Plan and Execute -, during
which certain activities occur. Some presentations list 4 or 5 phases, but the activities are
basically the same. The following diagram gives you an overview about what happens in
which phase. The activities displayed in bright blue are the ones where the functionality of
SAP Commercial Project Management supports us; although for some of them additional
tasks have to be done on the ERP side (e.g. for billing). Still, quite a big part of the whole
project lifecycle is covered by SAP CPM functionality. The smaller yellow boxes tell you
which component of SAP CPM is used for each individual step.

An example project lifecycle in SAP CPM

Keep in mind that this is an example process that is shown here for explanation purposes –
some steps might be different or in another order for your company’s processes.
Core features and functions of SAP CPM
Time to step into the application and look at the things that are under the hood. The key
benefit of SAP CPM / CA-CPD is that it provides one user interface to do things that are
complicated and distributed across multiple functions in ERP. Don’t be mislead, though:
quite a lot of the stuff you do still happens with the usual objects in SAP ERP, it’s just a new
interface on top. The three main pillars of SAP CPM functionality are:

 Project workspace
 Revenue and cost planning
 Project issue and change management

The Project Workspace

Building a Master Project

The centerpiece of SAP CPM is the new major business object that is introduced with it,
called a Master Project. It can be thought of as a big bucket that holds all documents that
are related to your project, such as PS Projects and WBS Elements, Sales Orders, Quotations
or Purchase Orders. You can even link objects from other systems such as SAP CRM
Opportunities, SAP PPM Portfolio items or even Salesforce.com documents (a BAdI
implementation is necessary for that). The Master Project is the reason why SAP CPM is
such a big gain in usability, enabling you to use SAP CPM as one source of truth and
jumping directly into target systems if necessary.

A Master Project has a structure, which is basically comprised of all the business objects
that have been added to it. This structure can be shown in several different views with
varying scopes and targets. For example, you can only show sales objects and purchasing
objects or only the WBS and network structure. This allows employees with different roles
to focus only on the objects that are important to them.

Depending on how you set up SAP CPM, most of the Master Project building happens
automatically, based for example on the account assignment of a sales order or a purchase
order. You can always add additional documents manually in order to have the full view of
your project, and of course you have the usual customizing options such as different types
of master projects that encompass different types of sub-objects, and so on. After the
Master Project is set up, you can easily access all relevant documents from the Project
Overview.

Cross-Project View

The project workspace is your main entry point in SAP CPM. It basically consists of the
Cross-Project View, which gives you an overview about all projects you’re involved in, and
several configurable project detail views that are used for project monitoring and control.
The really cool thing about the cross-project view are the configurable alerts that can be set
up for each user. You will then be able, for example, to get a red light for all projects that
have gone over budget/over time/et cetera, which is perfect for the higher management
levels that have to monitor multiple projects. Some of these alerts are delivered out-of-the-
box, and of course you can define your own.

Project Overview

Once you enter a project, you are taken to the Project Overview. In this set of screens, you
can see all relevant information about your project. Depending on which view you select,
you will see information about dates, costs, resources, issues or many other things.

Here, the resource view has been selected, which displays as a default the planned and
actual costs of the necessary resources in the project. There are several different screens in
the standard, and again, you can define your own screens however you like. Really neat
about these views is the embedded analytics part, which can graphically display the
information you’re viewing, enabling a much quicker overview about what’s going on.

Status Management

Another neat thing that shows that SAP seem to have put some thought into this is the
status management functionality. Don’t confuse this with the classic SAP ERP user status
functions. In SAP CPM, you can set the system to require periodic reviews of any desired
parts of the project. For example, if your line management requires an update of the project
plan every four weeks, you can set the system up accordingly. After an update has been put
in, the system can create a status report out of it that displays the changes made, optional
comments and even a trend indicator. This is a nice piece of functionality that covers the
ever-present requirement to constantly report on the project progress.