Document planning and scheduling

In times of ever more complex projects but simultaneously tighter deadlines, planning, deadline monitoring, and progress monitoring are central, important, and essential tools. Only this way, the adherence to deadlines can be influenced.

Numerous manufacturing companies are obliged to provide their customers regularly and above all punctually with relevant and comprehensive documentation. Often it is about documents that are needed for planning and development, installation, operation, and maintenance of a machine or plant.

Document planning and progress tracking for the necessary security

Planning, progress tracking, and deadline monitoring provide the necessary security for suppliers to avoid or at least minimize the often quite high penalty payments. This is where BDF’s SAP Product and Process Governance by BDF | SAP PPG comes into play with document planning and progress tracking. SAP PPG allows using document planning at a very early stage of the project. At this point, there are no physical documents yet. With the usage of virtual documents, however, they are already available in early project phases.

The virtual documents are, as stated before, carriers of scheduling data, among other things. The scheduling data usually consists of several schedule events that add up to so-called schedule chains. For deadline monitoring and progress tracking, planned and actual dates are available at each event. Planned dates are used for defining single milestone deadlines of a document or entire document groups. As the events are interconnected, they result in entire schedule chains, which automatically calculate the planned dates of all events by adding some additional time. With the automatically calculated planned dates, all document milestones can be defined beforehand. With the calculated schedule, it is therefore possible to ensure adherence to the schedule or, in the worst case scenario, detect a risk of missing deadlines at an early stage.

With reportings, an overview of the schedule statuses can be generated quickly across all documents. Therefore, a traffic light system is in use that signals with concise color coding which documents are at risk of missing deadlines.