Import from 3rd party financial appl to Project Server 2003

[TroyS]

I'm looking for some guidance on the difficulty (or straight-forwardness) and
gotchas of importing Actual Time and Actual Costs from a Financial Pkg to
Project Server 2003.

Due to:
1) Project Timesheets not having auditing/traceability (required for govt
contract compliance) and
2) Project doesn't handle very well different standard rates for resources
on different projects (ie consulting)

We are looking at importing from an external Financial appl, actual hours
and actual costs per resource/project into Project server 2003.

Any guidance on issues encountered or problems or whether this was fairly
straightforward to do...would be welcomed. Also, i'm assumng the PSI in
Project Server 2007 is much better at handling this than what is in the
Project Server 2003 API.....comments? thx.

 

[Rod Gill]

Hi,

This won't work at all well at the project/resource level. The only
integration that is worth doing is at the assignment level and to do that
you either need to export Assignment unique IDs or Task and Resource unique
IDs to the external timesheet so actual hours can be added to the correct
task/resource assignments on their return.

If you enter actual hours for a resource then Project does not know what
hours to assign to what tasks, let alone on what date. ditto at project
level. Anything Project could do would make a mess of the schedule and
create more work than it could ever save.

You can update Actual costs OK, but make sure you have Actual costs are
always calculated by Microsoft Project turned OFF under Tools, Options,
Calculation. However if you want to update actual costs for Tasks, then it
is much safer to have the Unique IDs in the Financial package so the correct
costs are linked to the correct Tasks. Failure to do this will either led to
numerous error messages when trying to update or wrong costs on wrong Tasks.

What you want can be achieved, but make sure you only go ahead with someone
who has been there before otherwise you will have a long trail of bugs and
problems that will take a lot of time/cost to get right!

--

Rod Gill
Project MVP

NEW!! Project VBA Book, for details visit: http://www.projectvbabook.com

 

[TroyS]

Thanks Rod,
Yes, the assignment ids will be absolutely critical...thanks for pointing
that out.
I'm trying to get them to not do this and look at Project Server 2007 for
compliant/auditable timesheets.