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Welcome to the second part (see first part here) of the Project Operations overview. We will focus on projects and contracts, and interactions between PO and F&O.

Projects and contracts

From Project Operations, an Organisation Unit has to be setup, it’s mandatory for managing contracts and projects.

Then, creating a new contract is done from the Sales module. As you can see, the Contracting Unit is chosen. There is a control between the Currency selected and the one available in the Contracting Unit. It’s also relevant to link with an Owning Company (from F&O) in which the Currency is available. Note the Sales Oder Number is auto incremented here.

Having a look on Product Price List value, make me think the pricing issues are managed here (Category Price and so on).

Let’s add a contract line. In here the billing method is selected : Time and Material or Fixed Price.  I’ve tested only T&M so far.

 From there, it’s possible to create a project linked to that contract line.

The project is retrieved on the project list from PO as you can see.

Important points to notice :

• It’s also possible to create projects and linked them to the contracts (instead of starting from the contract)
• I haven’t found so far any way to create internal projects (investments, cost, times…), it’s a real issue as many customers require to manage internal projects as well.
• It’s not possible anymore to create project from F&O

From F&O, the project is created instantly and automatically.

What’s up in F&O regarding projects ? The top headband is now very limited, as well as other module’s functionalities linked to project management. Today, it’s not possible to post any transaction such as production order, purchase order, purchase requisition to the project… making any use of the project nearly impossible.

When clicking on the link on the Project ID number, the PO page is displayed with the details of the project.

From PO, it’s possible to move on to next project stage. I don’t know yet if those stage are customizable in a easy way, or not.

From the Tasks tab of the project, we retrieve the WBS functionalities. With Grid, Board and Timeline, it’s a real enhancement regarding the WBS available in F&O projects. The Grid allows you to create steps of the projects as you can see below.

As WBS view is no more reachable from F&O, all that is set in PO is synchronized as project forecasts in F&O.

The Board make possible another grouping through buckets.

The Timeline shows the Gantt graph which can be adjusted by drag and drop on resources.

There is many tab available within a project such as Tracking for instance. All tab are dashboards relevants to Follow up of the project lifecycle.

Process

Let’s begin the process, by entering some time to a dedicated task for the connected user.

Carreful, the connected user has to be part to the appropriate legal entity (setup on the resources module). There is no possibility – from what I’ve seen so far – to post time to another user than the connected one. Then, the process requires to click on the Submit button.

The Time entry is in the Draft Entry Status, so we need to look at the Approvals menu to retrieve the current line.

From there, the simple workflow allows us to Approve or Reject the line. I haven’t yet dig the « Flow » options which make possible to trigger a workflow through the Power Platform.

Then, the Entry status of the line is Approved.

In the same way, it’s possible to create an expense.

Going back to the project. The PAQ line has been completed up to 8,65% as I have posted few time entries.

Now let’s invoice that to the customer. First thing is to go here : sales > Times and materials , under the Billing section. From there we need to tick the posted lines and make them « Ready to invoice ».

Otherwise, the invoice process will not work :

Then, there is different ways to create an invoice. Here is the one from the contract, by choosing the Create Invoice button.

For an amount of 2500 £, the project invoice is initialized. It matches with the invoice proposal from the ERP project.

Then, there is a process to follow (by the way it’s not mandatory to follow the process). The real trigger is to click on the Confirm button. After that, the invoice proposal is visible from F&O.

From F&O, there is different possibilities to run the invoice, one is to open the Post project invoice proposal.

Select the criterias and the invoice proposal is retrieved. Just post and that’s it.

Note here it seem to have some bug as the invoice is always setup to 0… Or a setup missing is also possible (I’m new here).

Back to Project Operation, and the invoice is visible from the contract.

To conclude, as always, there is a lot of interesting  functionalities  embedded within Project Operations and Finance and Supply Chain. I’m particulary impressed by the improvement done for the past 3 years with the synchronization between CRM and ERP through Dataverse thanks to Dual-Write. Regarding functional approach, there is a lot to enhance starting by internal projects, and the possibility to post some ERP transaction affected to any project.

Yohann