Monthly approval by Budget Manager?

E

Erwin

We have setup EPM 2003 with completed RBS, managed reporting periods
(~calendar weeks), standard security settings, etc. to support the
following time reporting process:

All hands-on workers in the organization are configured as Team
Members who report 8 hours per day on tasks for projects that are
managed by Project Managers.
All Team Members submit their hours for the entire week at latest by
Friday close of business.
Project Managers validate the reported time by Monday noon. They
accept hours that are indeed performed on their behalf, and they
reject wrongly reported hours.
Team Members make any needed corrections for the rejected task updates
and resubmit their reported hours on Monday afternoon.
Project Managers validate the final Task updates by Monday close of
business.

Resource Managers use the "View Resource Assignments" to perform
quality inspections on completeness and approval progress of the time
reported by their direct reports as defined in the RBS. They chase the
Team Members & Project Managers as needed to get completed and
approved time reported by all resources for each reporting period.

At the start of a new month, the Budget Managers (= the top-level
internal Resource Managers) validate the financial consequences of the
reported hours that are already accepted by the Project Managers.
This triggers the EPM Tool Admin to closing the managed reporting
periods of the previous month, to generate the digitally signed
monthly timesheets for the external resources and to transfer the
timesheet information to the ERP system (for budgets and to accept
payment of invoices from suppliers for external resources).

My specific questions is HOW can we implement the monthly validation
by the Budget Managers with the out-of-the-box EPM functionality?

Thanks for sharing your insights.
 
D

Dale Howard [MVP]

Erwin --

Thank you for your thorough explanation of your situation. Unfortunately,
there is no "out of the box" functionality in Project Server 2003 that
supports monthly budget validation by your business managers. Sorry.
 
E

Erwin

Dale,

OK, I was afraid that would be the answer, so here's 2 follow-up
questions:
1. Can the out-of-the-box Resource Manager approval functionality be
tweaked to support our monthly Budget Manager approval? If so, how?
2. Alternatively, what kind of custom development are we talking about
if we would consider to build this functionality?

Thanks for sharing.

Erwin Verheyen
 
D

Dale Howard [MVP]

Erwin --

To provide some type of Budget Manager approval would definitely require a
custom solution of some type. I'm not a software developer or a DBA
professionally, so I couldn't even begin to describe what would need to be
done or how to do it. If you are serious about this type of functionality,
I would recommend you enlist the services of a Project Partner to assist.
Hope this helps.
 

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