Estimating SAP PPM implementation

Question

Dear community,
I am involved in a project evaluation for a SAP PPM 5.0 implementation.
The goal and first step is to use Resource Management from SAP PPM 5.0.
Besides all the information I am able to gather within the marketplace and SCN, I can't get a feeling what time is needed to implement PPM for the use of resource management.
So far we can estimate our time/costs for:
Technical installations of hardware and software
SAP Licences
Where we miss a feeling for the time/costs are:
Basis configuration following the master and configuration guides
Advanced customizing for project creation, project roles, tasks, etc.
Integrating of already customized and prepared components/applications like CATS
I would appreciate your experiences and questions-need-to-be-asked of any kind related to my request.
SAP PPM 6.0 is not an option yet, still I like to consider any pitfalls if we would upgrade to 6.0 in a later point in time.
kindly
Darijo

Answer 1

Hello Darijo,
a) I guess so, but you should know that Resource Management is based on Business Partners. And usually, these are maintained in the HR system, although you can manually create them using T-code BP. For test purposes in a DEV/QA system it should be alright if you create them manually. But if you later do this in the productive system, you might have some errors on the long run.
b) Yes, Portfolio is a separate "object", so you can leave it out.
c) In my case, the company has a very specific product engineering process which was previously supported by 7 (yes, seven) different tools. They wanted to merge all these tools into one, having also extended features. So you can imagine they wanted quite a lot of changes, especially since we had to migrate the existing data.
Normally, it is recommended to keep the standard as much as possible, although not everything can be achieved by customizing.
d) Well, CA-TS can be integrated with PS/PM/HR/CO/MM. These are the standard possibilities. Other than that, I guess you can integrate it with whatever, but you'll have to create and maintain this yourself. We use PS mainly for cost calculations...
PPM (at least the cProjects) was designed to integrate closely with PS.
e) There isn't a lot of documentation you can find. So you'll have to figure it out yourself. I suggest you also read this book (even though is not that technical).
By the way, we also have some SAP consultants helping us with the implementation.
Also, this is a document I created (I plan to do more, but I don't always find the time)
How to properly enhance cProjects with an additional tab
Tudor