Quick and Easy Access to Specifications – Blog Series Part 7

[Blog Article | Reading Time: 2 mins]  Investment planning is a special case in planning. In practice, it proves to be extremely diverse and has numerous facets you need to take into account in the specifications at the latest. In most companies, investment planning has so far only achieved a low degree of standardization. Frequently, departments and plants enter their investment plans in Excel sheets and send them to controlling for approval. The disadvantages of this procedure are high expenditures and enormous susceptibility to errors.

The way to an efficient process

If companies were to integrate the investment planning process into an existing SAP system, they could eliminate some of the pain and make their controlling work much easier. The first step on such a path is to define the requirements for the desired future solution.

A requirement specification usually summarizes such requirements. It defines the desired functionalities and serves as a guide in the search for a suitable solution. The preparation of a requirement specification is often associated with a high expenditure of time. But there is another way: With our free requirement specification template, you can create your requirement specification for investment planning in just 15 minutes.

Requirement specifications: Actual situation vs. desired solution

The formal and content structure of the template follows the generally accepted standards for requirement specifications. First, the current situation (actual situation) of the investment planning is described: What is the current process? What are the resulting challenges?

In the next step, the author formulates the objectives with regard to the desired solution in the future. He names the most important overriding goals and improvements. The most common goals include integrating investment planning into the company-wide IT and SAP landscape, working with intuitive interfaces, and implementing approval workflows directly in the tool.

Next, the author names the concrete requirements so that the requirement specification is a real help for all those involved in the selection process of a new solution. Most of the time goes into this part when creating a "normal" requirement specification (without a template). The author can never be sure whether they have really compiled all the requirements for all the colleagues involved in the process. The situation is different when they work with our template for the specifications. It brings together requirements from many requirement catalogues and specifications. The author simply chooses the relevant requirements for his company.

Setting up a realistic timetable

Finally, a precise timetable increases the binding nature of the issue. It determines by when which steps you should complete. Above all, it is important to plan enough time for testing before the official go-live. Nothing is more unsatisfactory than a solution that doesn't run smoothly after the go-live. This achieves the exact opposite of the project objective: those involved in the investment planning process do not perceive the tool as a work relief, but as an additional burden and a nuisance.

Download the free template for your requirement specification.