Applies To: Project Operations for resource/non-stocked based scenarios, and Lite deployment – deal to proforma invoicing

A new day for a new post!

In this post I am focusing on the Lite deployment – deal to proforma invoicing deployment type more, but they overlap.

Organizational Units are part of the basic setup before you start using Project Operations. They can be confusing if you don’t understand the mechanics of why they exist.

Since naming is hard (that’s what I have been told) and because they play different roles in Project Operations, their name varies depending on where you are in the tool. They can be called: Organizational Units, Resourcing Units or Contracting Units.

Examples of where they are most confusing:

The diference in name can be explained by the fact that they support different functionalities in Project Operations.

These are:

–*As a COST center: It holds the COST Price Lists for Roles, Expenses, and Materials

-As a Resourcing Unit: Bookable Resources are associated with an Organizational Unit

*Note: There are some overlaps, but they don’t behave exactly like a COST CENTER concept would from a pure ERP sense, like Business Central, F&O, and others. But they do hold costs from a Business Unit perpective that can be later synced down to an ERP system.

As a COST CENTER, they hold the cost (only) price lists set up in the system against them. So, currency and a price list need to be attached as in the image below:

To illustrate this, let’s look at one example setup and create a project with Bookable Resources from different Units:

Let’s say they wear the same hat (role) in projects as Project Managers.

When my user (Juan Simon) creates a new project, it will pick up my Contracting/Organizational Unit automatically. It wants to know what the cost is for the roles. If I create a project and include Ashley Chinn, the project will display a labor cost automatically, by picking up her default role as a Project Manager:

Now, I want to add Clarence Desimone to support us in this project:

Now, the total changes to $ 5,472.00, because I have two PMs in a three-day duration or 24 hours of work scoped:

Under the Teams tab, we can see that Clarence Desimone is from a different Organizational Unit, but this bookable resource can be part of the team for this project:

Eveything just worked wonderfully! Why?

My Price Lists (COST & SALES) hold the answer. In it, I have all the roles and their prices, but I also have the same role prices from different Organizational Units.

It is important to note that this setup is necessary in order to use Bookable Resources from other Organizational Units and not have zeros in your estimates (both COST & SALES price lists need to match).

I hope this helps.

See you next time!