Baseline costs are normally the planned costs at the start of a contract or program, which unlike forecast costs or "estimate at completion" (EAC) do not change during the course of the contract. There are exceptions to this such as change orders or times when things have changed so much that it is necessary to "re-baseline" the program i.e. to recalculate the baseline.

Most ERP and project financial systems like SAP allow several planned cost versions in SAP such as:

• Program estimating baseline or the costs as estimated in the proposal (PEB)
• Program management baseline or the costs as planned out at the start of the program (PMB)

Typically the PMB is what gets re-baselined during the course of the program, not the PEB.

Baseline costs are only sent to SAP once the program has to be planned in earnest, meaning that resources and funds should be committed and initial delivery tasks commenced. This does not normally occur until the contract is actually signed, i.e. the proposal has been awarded to your company. Congratulations!  After the proposal award the first thing to do is to create a program estimating and management baseline in SAP using the proposal costs as a reference.

Baseline costs are ideally only sent once to SAP, since it is unlikely that the proposed or estimated costs will change after the contract is awarded. That is not to say change orders won't happen, they often start right away, however as explained above they would not affect the PEB or program estimating baseline.  That said, it is possible to resend the baseline costs to SAP multiple time because the transmission of these costs is a user activity.

From within the costing workbench, select the menu option (1 below) Send WBS Hierarchy to SAP first, and then later on (2) Send Cost Baseline to SAP, to send or re-send the estimated costs to SAP as a PEM and PMB baseline.

To view the logs or status of previous triggers of either the WBS Hierarchy (job-name ends with a "W") or the cost baseline (job-name ends with a "B") click on (3) View WBS/Baseline Logs and select the baseline transmission log file for the approximate date and time when you triggered it.  The date (as YYYYMMDD) followed by the time (in Greenwich mean time) is displayed as the job-name followed by "W" for WBS hierarchy and "B" for baseline cost. Please note that:

• You must send the "WBS Hierarchy" first otherwise you won't have WBS elements in SAP to post cost to
• The cost baseline for the entire proposal is sent to the PEB when you select the second option including direct labor costs and hours, material costs, travel and other direct costs, and indirect costs such as fringe, overhead and G&A
• While the PEB uses the indirect cost calculations from this application for fidelity, the PMB sends the material, travel and other direct costs plus the labor hours only, and relies on SAP to calculate the labor rates and costs, and to calculate the indirect costs using SAP's costing sheet concept

Before you send the WBS hierarchy to SAP you have to indicate where it goes. The project and contract are not created in SAP using this interface, it has to be created first manually in SAP with one or more high level WBS element(s).  Once the project and high-level or top level WBS are created in SAP they should be assigned to your proposal in the SAP Project and SAP WBS columns of the proposal WBS tab, as shown below.

1. Select the SAP project or program which you created for this awarded proposal.
2. If you do not see these columns in the WBS tab then add them as explained here (and as illustrated below)
3. Select the high-level WBS underneath which you want to create the WBS hierarchy from this application. In the example below WBS 1 "Top Level" is assigned to SAP WBS element 39-0001. This is all you need to do, there is no need to create and assign WBS elements in SAP for the lower level WBS elements, as these lower level WBS elements will be created automatically in SAP.

When the WBS hierarchy is sent to SAP the WBS elements below where the SAP project and WBS was mapped are created as WBS elements in SAP. In the screen shot above you will find that 1.1 "Child 1 Labor" will get added in SAP as WBS element 39-0001-01 underneath 39-0001. And WBS 1.2 "Child 2 Material" will be added also underneath 39-0001 as 39-0001-02. And so on, with as many levels as defined in your proposal being created in SAP.

It is important to set the control account and billing element checks correctly in your WBS hierarchy

When the cost baseline is sent to SAP a "PEM" planning version is created either as baseline planned project cost or as a Dassian-extension resource and cost plan, together with all direct + indirect costs as calculated in this application. At the same time a "PMB" planning version may get created, in Dassian's planning screens if this extension has been adopted depending on your system configuration, with direct material, travel and ODC costs from this application. At the same time labor costs are calculated within SAP based on the interfaced hours x SAP cost center/activity type rates, and indirect costs as calculated within based on SAP's costing sheet.

When you click on View WBS/Baseline logs from the "more" menu as highlighted below, you will see the status of the last few transmissions. The date and time (in GMT) is followed by a one letter suffix for which interface was run (W-WBS vs. B-baseline cost) followed by the status. The status will be either:

• FINISHED meaning the job ran successfully
• IN PROCESS meaning that the job is still running
• ERRORRED meaning that the job finished with some errors.

To view more detailed messages about the status of a previous job click on the job you want to investigate further from the menu list.

You will then get a popup with a list of all the messages and warnings provided, in SAP, when the WBS hierarchy or cost baseline was imported. And example of this message list is shown below, for a successful run.

1. Various messages are issued through the interface with detailed information about what was sent and how SAP received or processed it
2. At the end of the popup you can see the overall status or statistics on the SAP updates.