The Project Management Application (PM) is an integrated application and essential part of the NSD ERP SYSTEM. It concerns the management of all steps of the project from the presales phase, Inquiry and study up to Realize and Delivery; it's designed to support the planning, control and monitoring of long-term, highly complex projects with defined goals.

What is a Project?
Projects are tasks with special characteristics:
- They are generally complex, unique and involve a high degree of risk
- They have precise goals which are agreed on by you and your customer or you
- They are limited in duration and are cost and capacity intensive
- They are subject to certain quality requirements
- They are mostly of strategic importance for the company carrying out the project

Projects are generally part of the internal processes of a company. To be able to control all tasks in project execution, you need an organizational form that is specific to the project and which is shared by all departments involved.

To be able to carry out a project in its entirety, the project goals must be precisely described and the project activities to be carried out must be structured. A clearly and unambiguously structured project is the basis for its planning, monitoring, control and success.

One of the first steps in project planning is to break down the work into tasks and form a hierarchy.
The criteria you use to classify and divide tasks varies depending on the type and complexity of the project.
For example, the responsibility for tasks and the structure of the departments involved in some projects plays as much a role as the manufacturing or technical aspects in other projects.
In the Project System, you can plan the organization of the work and people in your project with the work breakdown structure (WBS).

One of the next steps in project planning is determining the sequence in which the tasks will be performed. In this step, you determine which tasks are dependent on each other and which tasks require additional work or must be broken down even further.
In the Project System, you can plan the processes and the sequence of tasks with networks.

A work breakdown structure (WBS) is a model of the work to be performed in a project organized in a hierarchical structure... The WBS is an important tool which helps you keep an overview of the project:

• It forms the basis for organization and coordination in the project.
• It shows the amount of work, the time required, and the costs involved in the project.
• The work breakdown structure is the operative basis for the further steps in project planning, for example, cost planning, scheduling, capacity planning as well as project controlling

• According to phases (logic-oriented)
• According to functions (function-oriented)
• According to objects (object-oriented)

In a work breakdown structure, you describe the individual tasks and activities in the project as individual elements in a hierarchy.
Depending on the phase of your project, you continue to break down the tasks and activities in your project, step-by-step, until you reach the level of detail necessary to carry it out.

The individual elements represent activities within the work breakdown structure. The elements are called work breakdown structure elements (WBS elements) in the Project System. WBS elements can be:

• Tasks
• Partial tasks which are subdivided further
• Work packages