SAP xRPM

Yesterday, I blogged about SAP's Collaborative Cross-Applications or xApps which is a collection of products from SAP and a range of software applications where are targeted to every specific industries. As promised, I will blog today about one of the popular xApps, the SAP xRPM.

SAP sees that most of the successful business organizations, whether small, mid size or multinationals, have achieved their relative successes because of the strategic optimizations of business values, activity balancing and aligning of overall portfolio with the objectives.

So SAP developed xRPM which is composite application meant to help manage company portfolios. The xRPM can manage a wide range of strategic and operational portfolios like professional service portfolios, product innovation management (PIM), and enterprise IT. Having xRPM in the business makes it have greater control over processes, products and services in their life cycles. As a result, it could be a lot easier for a company to innovate products.

SAP xRPM is powered by SAP Netweaver (I will blog about SAP Netweaver one of these days) and easily bolts in with existing IT setup in the company. It can even leverage with data from disparate systems from as relatively diverse as project management, and desktop systems, human resource and financial systems.
SAP and non-SAP can be have a pre-built integration that can provide out of the box transparency into project cost actuals, baselines, forecasts and other KPIs across the entire business portfolio.

The SAP xRPM has an easy to use GUI dashboard filled with sophisticated analytics with data sources from disparate systems. This can generate nicely formatted reports enabling the company to have continuous monitoring of the its portfolio performance.
Also in SAP xRPM’s dashboard are relevant project data with include key performance metric. These metrics relate to a business' essential processes like scheduling, staffing and budget aspects. Some at risk elements which are very critical for enterprise wide portfolio management can be seen with a centralized view making it easy for business decision makers to get bigger picture of the company.
SAP xRPM ca n allow users or managers to group projects together under a master project so that different reports in different areas of the business can be made easy to evaluate. At the same time, individual organizational projects can also be easily evaluated using key performance indicators like net present value, risk project schedule, expected commercial value and project budget performance.

In order to foresee any pitfalls which may occur in the future, SAP xRPM has a feature where portfolio managers can define critical success factor. This can further be detailed by simulating business activities of by varying project attributes and applying what-if scenarios.

SAP xRPM Portfolio Monitoring capability can help the company monitor all proposed, active and inactive initiative so that the right action can be taken. Staff in the company can share their views and important information in threaded discussions.

Overall, SAP xRPM can help the company spot the right people suited for particular tasks and employees can have initiatives in order for them to advance their careers.