General
Project codes must be unique; a message appears if you attempt to enter a non-unique code when adding a new project.
On the Project lines - planning and Project lines - financial forms, this field shows the project the line belongs to.
This field shows the status of the project. For each status, you should use a status type that represents the progress of the line. The available status types are 'Offer', 'Order', 'Actual costing' and 'History'. Unlike the status types in purchase, sales and production orders, the project status type is merely informational.
For each status, you can set the shading and color of the project lines in the planning graph of the project lines. The shape is determined by the project settings.
Use this informational field to assign a priority to the project line.
To display order data in projects, you need to create one or more links between the project and the order structure. By linking orders or order lines to the project, up-to-date order information is available from within the project about the planning, the costs incurred, and the revenues. Links can be established with a wide range of items, including sales orders, sales lines, purchase orders, periodic invoice lines, and operations. Order information can be linked at different levels, depending on the information you want to see at that level. For example, you could link a sales order at project level, to give you a general overview of the financial and planning data for the entire project. To get detailed information, you could link various production files belonging to the sales order to a phase, and link operations from one of the production files to the activities within a phase. You can also see more information by viewing the linked order or order line itself from within the project line.
You can link multiple orders or order lines to a project line, provided they are of the same order or line type, so that the data can be totaled in various project fields. This means you can link various production orders to a project line, but you cannot link both a periodic invoice line and a sales line to a project line.
Project lines of the 'Plan group' type cannot have any links. The link type will always be 'Not applicable' and cannot be changed.
Note: You are recommended to link one or more sales orders to the project first, before linking other orders related to the sales order. Because of the financial calculations to be made, a sales order must be linked to the project, as the sales order is leading in the financial processes.
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.
This is the date and time when the Calculate project line items process was last executed.
Planning and progress
This is the date the project (or project component) is expected to start. If the start date has been entered, the Wk field will automatically show the week number of the start date. To configure how a change to the start date affects the finish date and the lead time, use the Project settings option.
The date may move as a result of a change to the planning. The date can also be changed manually, if required. If the plan type is 'Estimated', the planning will be based on the estimated start date.
This is the date the project (or project component) is expected to finish. If the finish date has been entered, the Wk field will automatically show the week number of the finish date. To configure how a change to the finish date affects the start date and the lead time, use the Project settings option.
The date may move as a result of a change to the planning. The date can also be changed manually, if required. If the plan type is 'Estimated', the planning will be based on the estimated finish date.
This is the lead time of the project line. To configure how a change to the lead date affects the start date and the finish time, use the Project settings option.
Note: The lead time of a milestone is always 0 days.
The Restriction and Restriction date fields on the General tab enable you to control the planning by specifying restrictions for project lines, such as 'Do not start before'. In combination with the date you specify to the right of the restriction, this will create a condition that will be used during the planning process for the line. In the Gantt chart, restricted lines have the symbols you specify for Restricted start date and Restricted finish date on the Gantt chart settings form.
You can find an example in the Processes folder of the Help.
Use a plan type to define the dates to be used for calculations in a project. Choose whether the calculations on the line should use the estimated start date, finish date or lead time, the dates on the underlying project lines, or the dates specified in the linked order. The plan type also determines which information is visible in the Gantt chart.
As the project progresses and more details become available, you can choose another plan type in order to use the most reliable data available at that time. This allows you to set up a project in phases.
The Plan type field can be filled in the following ways:
Consider the following when choosing a plan type:
The plan type 'Estimated' can be used at the start of the project, when only a rough estimate can be made of the time required or the costs to be incurred. At this stage, the project line is not yet broken down into activities, subprojects, etcetera.
Once underlying lines are added to a project line (project, subproject or phase) of the plan type 'Estimated', the plan type is automatically changed to 'Calculated based on underlying lines'. You can now no longer change the plan type back to 'Estimated'.
The plan type 'Calculated based on underlying project lines' is available only for lines of the types 'Project', 'Subproject' and 'Phase'.
The plan type 'Calculated based on linked order information' can be used if order information is available, such as a planning or posted costs.
Use this informational field to enter the date on which the progress is to be checked.
This is an informational field in which you could enter the date on which the project must be completed at the latest.
Select the Complete check box to indicate that the project line has been completed. In addition, you can specify the date on which a project was completed.
Confirmation of a project as complete is an important project status. Once a project line has been marked as 'Complete', only some of the information on the project line can still be changed, such as the value of the Complete check box itself, the descriptions, the memo, and the texts. Project lines marked as 'Complete' can no longer be moved in the Gantt chart. Also, these lines will not be re-scheduled if they are successors of another line.
The following processes can no longer be executed when a line has been marked as 'Complete':
This check box is selected as soon as the Determine bottlenecks process has been performed and a bottleneck has been detected in the project. A bottleneck is defined as a discrepancy between the estimated start and/or end date of a project line, and the start and/or end date of the linked order information.
You can also manually select or clear this check box.
Note: If the plan type of the line is set to 'Estimated', you can manually fill in the fields in the Estimate column. If the plan type is 'Calculated based on underlying lines', the fields below 'Estimated' cannot be changed, and the data from the underlying lines are displayed.