SAP CATS for Contractor Labor Payments

Payment of contract labor services is often a cumbersome process in many organizations. The reason being, there are various stakeholders involved such as the managers / supervisors that need to approve timesheets, the purchasing department that needs to manage the PO's, AP paying the vendors, the vendors submitting the invoice and the contractors themselves, that need to keep one or more versions of their timesheets, depending on the client and vendor requirements. It is very common for companies to spend significant dollars to set up something like a vendor portal or time entry portal for contractors to achieve even a semi-automated system. More often than not, even a minor hiccup in the whole process,

FI Document Parking using SAP Workflow

Compliance with the journal entry standards set forth by company audit teams and Government agencies requires that several documents in financial accounting (FI) require a review and approval before they are posted in the system. The SAP FI Document Parking functionality provides the framework for subjecting an FI document to an approval process using the SAP Business Workflow component, along with several possible enhancements to the process per customer requirements.

Project as an Investment Measure

Projects are often used as investment measures in the Investment Management component to manage the accounting and controlling aspects of either

a) Investment initiatives to produce long-term fixed assets for the enterprise; these have to be entered in the balance sheet as Asset Under Construction (AUC); or
b) Other measures for which you want to plan, collect and oversee costs

Investment measures are represented in the system as internal orders or WBS elements, possibly with an AUC assigned to them. The flow of data between Investment Management and Project Systems has several powerful business processes encapsulated including cost planning, budgeting, monitoring progress of AUC, etc…. This article expounds on the features dealing with the management of and settlement of projects to AUCs when the investment measure is to construct a long term asset for the enterprise.

SAP PS: User-exits and Customer Enhancements

For functional consultants, having a list of customization options handy is priceless. Being aware of the possibilities to easily customize the system to meet their needs can add a lot of value. This article is dedicated to exploring enhancements and user-exits in SAP as they relate to the Project Systems module. There are several integration points for the PS module, which means that it adds value to a PS functional consultant to be aware of some of the pertinent user-exits from other related modules as well. I intend to keep this blog live with updates and new additions as I keep thinking of what else might be of value here. Some of these customization options will be discussed here, but most of them are linked from already existing sources, where they are more or less self-explanatory. If you would like to get more information in a given area, you’re welcome to leave a comment here or send me an email.

Logistical Processing for Project Stock

SAP provides the ability to manage individual stock segments as either project stock or sales order stock. Each of the stock segments can be managed in either valuated or non-valuated stock. This document is aimed at providing an overview of the general business processes associated with the logistical processing of project materials – valuated or non-valuated. In view of the extensive configuration and master data maintenance requirements, it is not feasible to provide extensive screenshots at this point in time, but we’ll save that for later..