- Internal processing
- External processing
- Costs
- Services
What do they mean? and what can they be used for?
Answer:
SAP Project System supports the following activity categories.
- Internal Processing: for capacities to be staged in
your own company
-- Internal activities are used to detail the work to
be performed
- External Processing: for tasks to be assigned externally
-- External activities are used to purchase resources
- Service Activities: for procuring external services
-- Service activities are used to purchase services
- Costs: for planning additional primary costs.
-- General Costs activities are used to plan additional
primary costs.
You use the activities in the network to plan the labor, capacities, materials, tools, and services you require to carry out various tasks in your project. By assigning milestones to activities, you can document events that are particularly important for the progress of the project and reference their respective dates in billing or invoicing plans.
For example:
During the project execution phase, commitment and actual
costs are updated automatically to the network activities as a result of
various business transactions (for example, confirmations, ordering processes,
goods issues, incoming invoices).
Material components for externally processed activities
What is the use and purpose of material components for externally processed network activities?
Answer:
Generally, material components are either internally acquired from production or inventory, or externally acquired from vendors. But the answer to your question depends on whether or not you are using valuated project stock, or no project stock in your PS settings. If you are using no stock, you would likely be acquiring all materials from vendors and expending them directly to the project. I ordinarily use an internal procurement activity for this purpose and add my material components to the internal activity. (This allows me to also assign internal labor cost to the activity of procurement.) If the Reservation/Purchase Requirement setting on the activity or component is “Immediately”, a requisition will be generated for the materials when you save the project. The Procurement Type setting on the component should be either Requisition + reservation for WBS element, in which case you’ll get both a reservation and a requisition number, or 3rd Party requisition, in which case you’ll get only a requisition number.
You can also use an external activity for this, but you must then assign a cost to the external activity of procurement, rather than picking up an internal labor activity rate.
You assign components the same way.
