PCP helps the portfolio planners:
- Create multi-year financial plans to determine which projects to undertake.
- Set up criteria for inclusion of planned and ongoing projects into the plan.
- Facilitate top-down (assign budget from capital plan) and bottom-up (assign budget at project level) PCP.
- Create multiple scenarios to compare and achieve optimal budget and forecast distributions aligned to strategic goals.
- Facilitate collaboration with project managers.
In Unifier, two factors impact PCP directly:
- Portfolio Manager: at a higher level within the Shell hierarchy (e.g., All Projects)
- Cash Flow: at a lower level within the Shell hierarchy (e.g., Projects)
Using the PCP entails using the Portfolio Manager to gather cost and schedule information on ongoing and planned projects and perform analyses on "what if" scenarios. See the Accessing Portfolio Manager section for details.
During scenario analysis, the portfolio planner will likely contact the project managers to negotiate numbers and dates. This exchange of information continues until all parties involved reach an agreement.
Note: Before you use the Project Controls base product, you need to prepare and configure the data that you need for using each component, in Unifier. Refer to the Unifier User Guide for instructions on how to prepare and configure the necessary data.
Administrators can refer to the Unifier Administration Guide to learn more about the following related topics:
- Portfolio Manager cash flow data sources:
In Unifier: Company Workspace (Admin mode) > Standards & Libraries > Cash Flow > Data Sources
- Project Cash Flow - Capital Planning:
In Unifier: Company Workspace (Admin mode) > Templates > Shells > Projects > Project Template > Cost Manager > Cash Flow
The following sections provide details about PCP and is based on the default setup of Unifier.