Project Partners Tailors Enterprise Project Management Applications to Fit
Engineering, Design, Construction & Operations Firms
Without Customization

Project Partners has tailored and extended our customers' systems to a perfect fit, via the use of Client Extensions technology within Oracle's Applications. Utilizing these supported, pre-defined user exit points, we've extended the software with code that is preserved upon upgrade.  This is a clear advantage over customizations that can break every time a patch is installed.

Take a look at some of the industry-specific extensions below to get an idea of what we can do for you. 

Billing Extension for Fixed Fee Plus Reimbursables – In this billing method, labor is billed using Events (Fixed Fee) and Non Labor is billed as incurred. In order to accomplish this without the use of an extension one would have to use a WORK/EVENT distribution rule and enter all billing as an event. However, the client wanted to take advantage of WORK based billing for non labor. To accomplish this, a Billing Extension (Pre-Processing) was defined to put all labor items on bill hold prior to the generation of draft invoices. The project could then be set to WORK/WORK distribution rule so that non-labor items were billed using WORK based billing.  The other important use of this extension is to support projects with a combination of Fixed Price and Time & Materials arrangements. The project can be setup with the WORK/WORK distribution rule. This extension can then simply be assigned to those tasks that you wish to bill using events.

Labor Billing Extension for Project/Task Level Bill Rates – Without extensions, bill rates for labor are defined either by employee or job on a bill rate schedule. The client, however, utilized a single bill rate at the Project or Task level. By using the Labor Billing Extension and a descriptive flexfield on the Project and Task to hold the bill rate, the maintenance of bill rate overrides was eliminated.

Billing at Percent Complete Milestones – This extension was developed to meet a requirement to automatically invoice an agreed amount upon achieving certain percent complete milestones. The standard percent complete screen within projects was used to capture actual percent complete (not financial percent complete) information. This Billing extension then checks the percent complete information and automatically creates billing events for the pre-determined amounts during mass invoice generation.

Labor Costing using Actual Labor Rates – This extension meets the requirement to calculate actual labor cost by employee using salary information from Oracle Human Resources. During Labor Distribution the costing extension retrieves the actual base salary information for the employee and determines the base labor rate per hour as (Weekly Salary / Total Hours). This enabled our client to better meet DCAA requirements for their government contracts. Without this extension one would need to maintain actual labor rates by employee in the Oracle Projects labor rate detail screen. In addition, the extension is able to calculate the actual labor rate per hour even as total hours per week change for exempt personnel.

Labor Costing using Average Actual Labor Rate per Job - The previous extension is also used to calculate the average labor rate per hour by Job. For example, the salary information for all Senior Engineers is retrieved and averaged to compute an average actual labor rate.

Bill when Paid – This extension meets the requirement to bill the customer for supplier costs only once they have been paid. The Billing Extension solves this requirement by putting expenditure items on hold that have not been paid by checking the payment status in Oracle Payables. Once the item has been paid the extension removes the billing hold.

Labor Billing Extension for Activity Code Override Rates – The labor billing extension is used in conjunction with the creation of dummy jobs in Oracle HR to permit the entry and maintenance activity-based override rates. The standard Job Bill Rate Overrides window is used for the entry and maintenance of these overrides.

Labor Costing for Prevailing Wages – This extension enables a client to comply with California Prevailing Wage regulations. The labor costing extension is used in order to correctly cost labor for projects and payroll purposes. The labor costing extension costed labor charged to a prevailing wage project at the highest of three rates:

• The employee’s hourly rate (from Oracle Human Resources)
• The Basic Hourly Rate for the prevailing wage work classification
• The Wage Determination Rate for the prevailing wage work classification, adjusted for fringe benefits.

Work In Process – By default all costs are expensed, however, this extension calculates WIP and creates the appropriate accounting entry using events to relieve or add to WIP. This extension like Oracle’s Cost Accrual extension makes use of the Billing Extension’s ability to create automatic events.

Billing Retention – This extension was used to check the project status to determine eligibility for billing retention withheld. Once the project status of the project was changed to ‘Retention Billable’ this extension recognized the eligibility of the project to bill previously withheld retention.

Contact us to learn how we can help you: