It is very common that we are required to create a T&M change order against a fixed lump sum prime contract. 

At the moment, there appears to be no faculty in SCM to create a CO of a different contract type than that of the Prime contract.

If a T&M CO is to be created against a FLS Prime Contract, it has been stated that a Change Order should be created, costs should be logged against the change order, and then those costs should be imported to the change order in order invoice the CO as T&M. In our integration with SIC, this proposed workflow is not feasible, as once the CO is created and synced down to SIC, it is no longer possible to import items to the CO.

The use of Work Orders has also been suggested. Work Orders do provide some remedy here, but they create a litany of other issues in utilizing SIC. The largest issues being:

• Work Orders are not a concept in SIC. As such, cost accumulated against a work order in SCM appears to be against the prime contract in SIC. This can lead to a drastic overstatement of cost in excess when calculating WIP.
  • Likewise COs that are Cost Plus with GMP in nature should have their contract revenue taken into consideration in calculating WIP
• Since work orders are not a concept in SIC, there is no accounting link functionality. As such, if new cost codes etc are to be added to the work order, then it is not possible to transfer these to SIC via the work order.
  • Not having the proper cost codes in SIC creates further issues with third party integrations like Assignar
• There is no concept of workflow for work orders, which under this methodology effectively allows for T&M COs to be initiated without approval – and no workflow comes about until all
• It is possible that multiple invoices are generated against the same T&M CO. In this scenario, additional work orders could be created, but once an invoice has been created against a CO, it will no longer be possible to add the new work order items to the CO.

We have also tried:

 CO to update CO

1. 1. Create a CO with an estimated cost and revenue budget
   2. To invoice CO as T&M, run a report to identify expenses against CO
   3. Manually calculate “billing amount”
   4. Create a CO against the CO to correct the cost and revenue budgets for billing
2. Create a new prime contract for T&M change orders
   1. Create new prime contract of type “Cost Plus w/ GMP”
   2. Accounting Link does not seem to allow multiple prime contracts without setting up sub-projects in SIC
   3. When using sub-projects issues are encountered in transferring projects to Assignar (third party integration)
3. Create a new project for T&M Cos
   1. Create a new project and prime contract for T&M Cos
   2. Loose track of overall project expenses in SIC
   3. Issues with double-booking resources in Assignar (third party scheduling/dispatch software)

The above ideas obviously all have some considerable drawbacks, and we are struggling to find a viable solution.

An idea (SAGECM-I-598) has been submitted to the ideas portal to allow for COs of a different contract type than that of the prime contract.

Does anyone have a better solution?