Project Partners Blog

In looking at various clients who are using or trying to use workplan functionality in Oracle Project Management (PJT), I find that the biggest issue people face (after they get all the right patches needed to get workplans to work correctly) is getting actuals to map into planned resources correctly. If this is not done correctly, based on the client needs, then what you get is a bunch of unplanned actual assignments that increase the cost of the project on the workplan as the planned amounts on the planned assignments do not get reduced correctly by the actuals.There are some basic points to remember when defining which planning resources you use in order to get actuals to map correctly to them.

1. All resources assigned to the workplan tasks have the following attributes on them:
   1. Resource Class
   2. Organization_ID (Expenditure Org)
   3. Default Expenditure Type
2. Now if the resource formats you use do not include the Organization or expenditure type on them, these values will be defaulted to each task assignment you make as follows:
   1. The Project/Task Organization defaults as the expenditure Organization unless it can derived from some other attribute of the resource such as the named persons assigned organization or the assigned organization from the Non-Labor Resource.
   2. The default expenditure type assigned to the resource class in the resource class setup is defaulted to the expenditure type on the assignment.
3. None of the other resource attributes are defaulted to the assignment unless they are a part of the resource definition (based on the resource format). Now this is done to allow Oracle to automatically compute the burden cost (from the raw cost calculated) and this needs expenditure type and org as these are the 2 main dimensions used in the setup of burden schedules.
4. The following issues can arise due to this defaulting:
   1. If the project/task organization is not setup as an expenditure organization, no actuals will ever map to the planning resources as actuals always have a different expenditure organization.
   2. If you have actuals coming in with different expenditure types for the same basic planned resource, only those actuals with the same expenditure type as the one defaulted to the task assignment will map to the planned resource. All others will show up as unplanned actuals.
5. Finally here are some rules to follow in order to get your actuals to always map to the planned resources as intended:
   1. If there is any possibility that the expenditure organization of actuals will be different from the that of the project/task, include organization into the your resource formats making people plan by the correct org and hence the actuals will map correctly
   2. Include Financial Category (Oracle speak for Expenditure type, Expenditure Category) into your resource formats. Now if you don’t care for burden cost on the workplan, then the suggestion will be to not setup a default Expenditure type on the resource class setup and then it will be not default to the task assignment and hence should not screw up your mapping.

That’s it for now and remember:
There is no better way to manage a business than to Manage by Project.

PS: I welcome all comments / trackbacks / pingbacks / queries to my nascent venture here. I will try and respond to your comments, etc in future entries.