If the sales, production or purchasing process has started, you can include the order data in the project calculations. By linking one or more orders to a project, you will have a wealth of up-to-date information about planning, costs and revenues at your fingertips. This will give you useful information about the order progress over time, and about the costs and revenues relating to every order.

Before you start establishing links, decide on how detailed the order information should be, and what type of information you require. Even a simple link will provide a lot of information. You can also choose to track the progress of specific tasks. When creating links, you can choose from various types of orders and order lines.

To display order data in a project, establish a link between the project and one or more orders. This link can be created both from within the project and from within the order structure.

Your information needs will determine which links you need to create. You can link one or more orders or order lines to a project or task. Within a project, different types of links can be established, as long as just one link type is used for a project or task. The use of different link types within the same task would prevent the corresponding values (such as hours and sums) from being added up.

Examples of links:

The most basic link is a link between a project and a sales order and production orders. This link will give you a quick overview of the financial and planning data.

To view detailed progress information, link a sales order to the project, and link production orders to a phase.

If you also want to be able to track critical operations, link a sales order to the project, link production orders to a phase, and link the operations to activities within the phase.

To display periodic invoices over time, link them to milestones. The link enables you to see which periods are to be invoiced and when.

To see all current purchase orders for a project at a glance, you could link them to a subproject. This link will display the commitments. If required, you can use budgets for your purchases.

To monitor the delivery time of parts ordered, you can link purchase lines to the 'Production start' milestone, for example. This will allow you to check whether important purchases will be received on time for use in the production process.

To check whether you will be able to deliver on time, you could link shipping lines to the 'Promised delivery date' milestone, for instance.