Purpose

Things like delivery difficulties, price variations, and unforeseen capacity bottlenecks can cause your project to vary from what you planned. In such cases, the contracting parties need to establish who is responsible for the variance. You can use Claim Management to do this. Claim Management ensures that subsequent claims, resulting from variances, against the contract partner can be prepared and submitted at the appropriate moment, or claims by the contract can be headed off.

The Project System supports Claim Management using a notification type called "claim". You use these notifications to document variances from your project plan, name the person responsible, and initiate follow-up activities. The following are among the points you enter in the claim:

• Cause of the variance
• Person or group responsible
• Costs arising from the variance
• Actions and tasks to be initiated because of the variance

The integration of unit costing with the claim and the link to workflow functions in the R/3 System ensure efficient Claim Management execution.

When you detect a variance from your project plan, you create a claim in the R/3 System or using an Internet application. This means you can document variances either at your R/3 work station, or at any computer that has Internet access. This makes claim entry easy and convenient. You can enter claims at a construction site, when traveling, and so on. The flexible user interface makes things even easier.

You can enter details of the claim using long texts. In addition to the notification header long text, four other long text categories are available. You can use them to structure the information on the claims. For example, you can enter reasons for the variance from the project plan and the action to be taken as a result in different long text types. You can give the long text types any names you like. The facility for accessing information per long text type enables you to target information selection.

You can add additional, detailed information to the claim in the form of business documents or DMS documents.

You can access all the information you define for a claim at any time, using the R/3 System. You can also access the most important information using the Internet. This ensures that everyone involved in the project can obtain information about claims relating to it.

As claims usually cause additional costs, you can enter the costs you expect to arise either when you create the claim, or later, when more precise information is available. The following options are available:

• Enter the estimated costs manually.
• Create a unit costing from the claim or link it to an existing unit costing.

You can also enter the costs demanded and accepted manually.

Status management and workflow are two more high-performance tools you can use to process claims in the R/3 System. The link between claim management and status management means that you can make processing of a claim dependent on its status. You might, for example, sti***te that a claim cannot be closed until all the measures relating to it are complete.

Using workflow enables you to have information distributed automatically within your business. If, for example, you create a claim that requires approval, a work item automatically appears in the inbox of the person who must give that approval.

The system documents all changes to the claim in the action log.

Once you have processed and closed your claim, you can archive it. A deletion program deletes the database records for claims successfully archived.

The worklists for notifications and tasks include an overview of the claims to be processed and the tasks associated with them.

For detailed evaluations of claims, go to the information system and access the overview reports for the claims.

As you can assign the claim to a project or WBS element either when you create the claim or later, you can display all the claims created for a project/WBS element in the information system.

You can use an evaluation program to display the data for claims already archived.