Hi everybody, is there anybody who can explain me how the Project Progress works? I don't know the way to progress the activities.

Project activities are updated thru hours accounting against the project. If you want to manually show the progress then make the field "automatic update" in session maintain activity, form 2 as no and use the field "percentage complete" top show the progress.
regards

It depends on the Project definition, U can book the progress based on Element and same will be proportiontly allocated to the activities linked to the Elements.

U can book w.r.t Activity.
U can also book at the Control activity / element level.

There are very user friendly methods to capture the project progress.
If U can substantiate, how U are presently doing, then its easy to suggest a method.

I'd like to make the project progress through the activity progress, is that possible? Which is the session to maintain activities? Can someone explain me the difference between the "unit" and the "time unit" in session tppss2100s000 "Charge ELements"? And also the meaning of the fields quantity and production rate.

Yes, that's possible. You can either maintain progress in an ESP (external scheduling package) such as MSP and pass it to Baan from there, or enter it directly in the maintain charge elements session (form 2 I think).
Run generate progress from planning to copy it from there to activity, cost type by activity and cost object by activity.
This of course only updates progress and through that (depending on set-up) the allowed cost in project monitoring. It has nothing to do with the actual (labour) cost.

Regarding units: although labour (tasks) are usually expressed in hours, Baan lets you use other units. For example a task 'painting' could be expressed in square metres (or feet), with a production rate of x sqm/hr, which is then used by Baan to calculate the time required. Baan is also flexible about the time unit to be used, you can plan in hours or days, whatever you want (providing you also tell Baan how many hours there are in your day, this will work ok).

Ok, but now I'm wondering when Baan calculates the time required and where it updates this information.
Moreover I'd like to know where I can insert the relation (like end-end, begin-end) between charge elements.
Could someone talk me about experience in using only Project module disconnect from all the other Baan modules.

baan calculates the time required when you enter the budget line. The time (and planned start and end time) are shown in the maintain activity budget sessions.
In Baan V, you cannot define any relations between activities / charge elements. This has to be done in the external scheduling package. In Baan IV you can, but there are no charge elements in Baan IV so I don't think you were referring to that version.

Using the project module without any other Baan modules? I cannot think of a single reason to do so. Baan Projects will help you in scheduling your materials (through project requirement planning) and in your financial accounting for the projects, but if you don't need any of that then just use any stand alone planning tool such as MS Project or Open Plan.

Thank you for your reply...i was referring to Baan V, that's correct. Can you explain me how I can define relation between CE and activity using the external scheduler?

Charge Element is a budgeting concept, activity a planning concept. Other than that, they are more or less the same thing if your projects use activity budgeting, each charge element will be exported to the planning tool (MS-Project) as an activity and you define the relationships between them in the normal way in MSP.

Those relationships between activities are not visible in standard Baan, but our version has been customised to make it possible to define and view the relations in Baan (similar to Baan IV functionality).

Ok, that's clear. Moreover can you explain me another thing: is it possible to progress a project by hours accounting? Better, how can I progress the activities?

Sorry, I don't know.
Our software is customised, we record progress in MSP, this is transferred back to Baan and then once an activity has been completed, the labour budget lines are backflushed (similar to manufacturing functionality). So our customisation generates the hours accounting records from progress, not the other way around as you suggest.

In standard Projects, (activity) progress and cost are two completely separate issues. The (in my opinion valid) assumption is that you can spend loads of time or materials against an activity without actually making any useful progress, so progress and cost are recorded separately and not linked in any way.

Hi,
I use BaaN IV. I want to know how can I setup the system to registers progres on base of accounted hours!
I read some opinions above, but I did not understad exactly what is the relation between them.

Hi,
I use BaaN IV. I want to know how can I setup the system to registers progres on base of accounted hours!
I read some opinions above, but I did not understad exactly what is the relation between them.

As far as standard Baan goes (and I can see the logic behind it) there is NO relationship between the amount of time spent on a task and the actual useful progress made.

Any link between the two would be based on assumptions which may be realistic in a PCS/ repetitive manufacturing environment but would be dangerous in a TP/ one-off project environment.

It shouldn't be too difficult to customise the system to make it do whatever you want though, either by generating accounted hours from progress registration (backflushing, which is what we did) or the other way around by generating progress from hours accounting.

Thank you very much!