Project Partners Blog

The information below provides an overview of the reporting and metrics available in Project Analytics for Project Management. The synopses can be found on the Dashboard Index and describe each tab within the Project Management Application. Additional details on each of the screenshots describe details of the metrics and functionality within each of the interactive dashboard pages.

Project Management

Screenshots of the default dashboard for each tab within the Project Management application area are shown below. Results in the dashboards can be filtered using the parameters at the top of each dashboard. Additional query modifications are available using the ‘Modify’ link.

1.1 – Project Performance

Provides the default-aggregated view of information for all the projects satisfying the dashboard filter criteria, with the ability to drill down to a specific project details. This dashboard page provides quick overview of key performance indicators such as ITD margin %, ITD cost and revenue variances for the group of projects or a specific project. It also provides a quick snapshot of covering cost, efforts, revenue, billability and billing for the group of projects or for a specific project.

Gauges show margins, variance for costs, revenue and forecasts. My Projects displays in chart or table format Budget, Actual and ETC costs for the user’s projects. Financial Performance aggregates the data in My Projects. Clicking on a specific project filters all Project Performance data for that specific project    .

Margin Percentage Trend displays ITD Forecast, Budget, and Cost Margins over time and allows drill thru to Profitability Details. Cumulative Cost Trend shows ITD Forecast, Budget, and Cost Totals over time and allows drill thru to Cost Details.

Effort, Cost, Revenue, Billability and Billing compare Original Budget, Current Budget, Actuals, Percent Spent, ETC, EAC, and calculate Variances using those factors.

1.2 – Financial Management

Provides the default-aggregated view of information covering the financial aspects for a group of projects or a specific project satisfying the dashboard filter criteria. This dashboard page provides quick overview of Inception-to-date performance, variances, cumulative revenue, cost, margin, billing and period over period changes and the funding summary with the ability to drill down to takes or resources, including trending.

Actuals, Budget, Variance (Budget vs. Actuals), Forecast display Cost and Revenue Actuals, Budget and Forecast Amounts, Margins, Variance all by Fiscal Quarter. If Financials Analytics is enabled, you can drill thru to Procurement and Spend Analytics.

Trend views show Revenue and Cost Trends by Quarter. Further, Revenue and Costs display Quarter over Quarter Trends. Drill thru to Cost and Revenue Details and Cost and Revenue Transactions is possible from these charts (more trends follow below).

 

Trends: Invoice Amount, Unearned Revenue and Unbilled Receivables are displayed by Quarter by Project. Funding Summary by Project shows Original Funding, Additional Funding, Total Funding, Baselined, and Remaining Funding.

1.3 – Budget Details

Provides the detailed budget information for the projects and the tasks under the projects with the ability to drill down to child tasks and resources. It provides the budget accuracies for cost and revenue, budget changes in comparison with original budgets, including trending and other details.

Budget Accuracy by Project displays EAC, ETC, Current Budget, Actual Costs, and Actual Revenue amounts. Clicking on Project allows task drilldown. Amounts are charted by Cost Budget and Revenue Budget Accuracy. You can also drill thru to Budget Accuracy by Financial Resource.

Budget Trend by GL Period displays Current Cost and Revenue Budgets, Forecasts, Budget Margin and Forecast Margins. Amounts are charted below the table. You can drill thru to Cumulative Budget Trend by GL Period and to Budget Transactions.

1.4 – Cost Details

Provides the detailed cost information for the projects and the tasks under the projects with the ability to drill down to child tasks and resources. It provides the cost comparisons of employees, job codes, tasks and other resources, including trending and other details.

Actual Cost by Project, Financial Resource shows total Costs and Billable Costs by project. These amounts are charted as well. You can drill thru to Actual Efforts by Project, Financial Resource.

Dimensions include Project Name (shown), Expenditure Category, Resource Type, Top Level Task Name and Supplier Name. Metric includes Billable Cost, Non-billable Cost, Capitalizable Cost.

Actual Cost Distribution by Job Code can be displayed in a Chart of a Table. This is also true for Actual Cost Distribution by Employee (named Person).

Cost Trend by Fiscal Period displays Current, Forecast, Billable, Non-billable, Actual Costs, along with Cost Variance and Cost Variance Percentage. Amounts are charted as well.

Drill thru is possible to Cumulative Cost by Fiscal Period, Cumulative Cost Billability by Project, Cumulative Cost Variance by Project, People Effort by GL Period, and Cost Transactions.    

 

Actual Total Cost, Equipment Cost, and People Cost by Project breaks these cost amounts out by project. Amounts are charted as well.

1.5 – Revenue Details

Provides the detailed revenue information for the projects and the tasks under the projects with the ability to drill down to child tasks and resources. It provides the revenue comparisons of employees, job codes, tasks and other resources, including trending and other details.

Revenue by Project, Financial Resource displays Revenue and Bill amounts by project. Amounts are also charted.

Dimensions include Project Name, Resource Type, Top Task Level Name, Revenue Category and Customer.

Revenue Distribution by Employee charts each Employee’s percentage of revenue. Revenue Distribution by Job Code charts revenue contribution by Job Code.

Revenue Trend by Fiscal Period displays Current Budget Revenue, Forecast Revenue, Revenue Amounts, Bill Amounts, Unbilled Receivables, and Unearned Revenue by Project. Some of these are charted as well.

You can drill thru to Cumulative Revenue Trend by Fiscal Period, Revenue Transactions and Event Revenue Details by Project.

ITD Actual Revenue Details by Project shows Revenue and Bill Amounts by Project, Project Manager, Revenue Category, Primary Customer, and Agreement Number

1.6- Profitability Details

Provides the detailed profitability information for the projects and tasks under the projects with the ability to drill down to child tasks and resources. It provides the comparisons of the profitability to the budgets and forecasts, and period over period changes in the margin, including trending and other details.

Actual Profitability by Project, Revenue Category displays Actual Margin compared to QAGO Actual Margin by project. Forecast Margin displays Forecast by project.

Dimension includes Project Name, Expenditure Category, Revenue Category, Job Name. View includes Margin Percentage, Margin, Revenue Cost and Data.

 

Actual Profitability Trend and Distribution by Fiscal Period shows Actual Margin Percentage, Actual Revenue and Actual Costs. View includes Trend, Revenue Distribution, Cost Distribution, Margin Distribution and Data.

Profitability Details by Project displays Revenue and Cost Budget, Actual Cost, Actual Revenue, Actual Margin, Actual Margin Percentage, Forecast Revenue, Forecast Cost, Forecast Margin, Forecast Margin Percentage, Actual/Budget Cost Variance, and Forecast/Budget Cost Variance by Project.

1.7- Funding & Billing

Provides the funding and billing details for a project or a group of projects and the tasks under the projects. It provides the overview of agreement amount, funding amount that is assigned to a project, revenue amount that is accrued, invoice amount that is billed, funding changes and the remaining funding that alerts the organizations the potential capacity or efficiency problem.

Funding Summary by Customer by Project by Top Task shows Funding Amounts by the following Dimensions: Project Name, Top Task, and Customer Name. Amounts can be graphically displayed as well.

Remaining Funding Amount for Active Projects displays Funding Amount, Revenue Amount, Remaining Funding Amount, and Remaining Funding Amount Percentage.

Funding Details by Customer by Project by Top Task shows Initial Funding, Additional Funding, Adjustment Funding, Cancelled Funding and Net Funding by the following Dimensions: Project Name, Top Task, and Customer Name.

Lost Funding for Closed Projects shows Funding Amount, Revenue Amount and Lost Funding for closed projects. Includes Project Organization.    

Billing Summary by Project by Customer shows Agreement Amount, Invoice Amount, Approved Invoice Amount, Number of Approved Invoices, Unapproved Invoices Amount, Number of Unapproved Invoices, Unearned Revenue and Unbilled Receivables by Project and Customer.

Hidden Dashboard Pages

By default, the hidden Dashboard Pages do not display within their application area. They can be added to the application area. The hidden pages below contain Transaction Details

1.8- Cost Transactions

Provides detailed cost transactions at expenditure date and item level for a given project, and resource. This dashboard is designed to provide weekly or daily cost transactions report.

Project Cost Transaction Details displays cost data by Fiscal Date, Project Name, Expenditure Organization, Incurred by Person, Supplier Name, Quantity, UOM, Raw Cost, Burden Cost, Total Cost, Currency, Resource Type, Expenditure Category, Billable Flag, and Capitalizable Flag. All Data may be displayed or can be sorted. Filters can be used to refine the data displayed. Data can be downloaded to Excel.

1.9- Revenue Transactions

Provides detailed revenue transactions at expenditure date and item level for a given project, and resource. This dashboard is designed to provide weekly or daily revenue transactions report.

Project Revenue Transaction Details displays data by Fiscal Date, Project Name, Project Organization, Incurred by Person, Job Name, Revenue Amount, Currency, Work Type, Resource Type, Revenue Category and Revenue Transfer Status. All Data may be displayed or can be sorted. Filters can be used to refine the data displayed. Data may be downloaded to Excel, or saved off to a ‘Briefing Book’, which either statically or in updatable format.

1.9a – Budget Transactions

Provides detailed budget transactions at budget type, version and budget period level .

Budget Transactions by Project display data by Project Name, Budget Type, Budget Status, Budget Name, Budget Version, Currency, UOM, Budget Line, Original Budget Cost, Original Budget Revenue, Current Budget Cost, and Current Budget Revenue. All Data may be displayed or can be sorted. Filters can be used to refine the data displayed. Data may be downloaded to Excel.

Summary

The information above should provide the reader with sufficient information on the Project Management application area within Project Analytics to know about the breadth of the reporting capabilities for that part of Project Analytics.

Next Up: Please return soon for the next Project Analytics summary blog, this time for Project Executives.

Executing multiple projects for one customer is common practice for many project-based organizations. But what happens when the time comes to invoice your customer for work performed? Native Oracle Projects allows you to generate only one invoice per project. So, multiple projects lead to multiple invoices. For many organizations, this involves hundreds, maybe thousands of invoices being processed each month. Invoicing for such complex situations is extremely daunting, expensive and time consuming. Each invoice needs to be generated, approved, issued, mailed, processed, reconciled and audited. Not only is this a time and money waster for you but your customer is on the receiving end of this accounting nightmare.

Native Oracle Project Billing does a good job of calculating and generating your draft invoices but many companies need the power to consolidate invoices at a higher level than a project. Seeing this requirement over and over, Project Partners developed a solution to streamline the often complex project invoicing process. It is called Project Partners Consolidated Invoicing. Consolidated Invoicing is included in the Project Partners Invoicing product offering designed to simplify the various customer billing mandates facing project organizations today.

Consolidated Invoicing is a simple solution that does not involve changes to your current Oracle Projects setup or configurations. This solution simply extends the standard invoicing functionality of Oracle Project Billing and Oracle Receivables, therefore requiring no additional training for your users. By utilizing the same invoice processes and review screens currently in use by your project managers and accountants today, such as Invoice Review, Generate Draft Invoices, Interface to Receivables, Autoinvoice import etc., Consolidated Invoicing allows you to consolidate multiple project invoices into one single invoice. You can issue one monthly invoice to a customer at a summary level, with back-up details that break the charges down by project. Your options for consolidation include invoicing across multiple projects, programs, agreements, contracts, or customer “bill to” levels.

With Consolidated Invoicing, project invoicing can be simplified and your project managers and accountants can refocus on activities that add real value to your organization. In addition, your customers receive one invoice from which to pay and the reconciliation of your customer accounts becomes almost seamless. Customers that have implemented this solution have seen time savings of up to 100 hours per invoicing cycle which translates to a cost savings of up to 80%. A solution any project based organization with many projects should consider. Make your project invoicing easier using Project Partners Consolidated Invoicing.

Stay tuned for future blogs on Credit Memo Consolidation and Invoice Formatting and Printing – two additional offerings included in Project Partners Invoicing designed to make project billing easy!

Invoice Consolidation Overview:

OPM3® (Organization Project Management Maturity Model) is a Project Management Institute® (PMI) standard much like the PMBOK® Guide that was started in 1998 by PMI.

The OPM3 standard consist of three major elements: Knowledge, Assessment & Improvement and they are described below.

Knowledge: The user becomes proficient in OPM3, the body of Best Practices, the ideas of organizational project management maturity, and methodology of OPM3.

Assessment: The organization compares itself to OPM3 Best Practices to determine its current location on a continuum of organizational project management maturity.

Improvement: Change Initiatives leading to increased maturity can use the results of the assessment as a basis for planning, and move forward to implement the plan while conserving precious organizational resources.

OPM3 Benefits

Advance strategic goals

OPM3 provides a way to advance an organization’s strategic goals through the application of project management principles and practices, bridging the gap between strategy and individual projects

Understand and implement Best Practices

OPM3 provides a comprehensive body of knowledge regarding what constitutes Best Practices within organizational project management Identify maturity

OPM3 assists an organization with the identification of what their current organizational project management maturity is and, thus, forms a basis for deciding whether or not to pursue improvements by Stage and Domain

Plan improvement activities

OPM3 assists organizations with prioritizing and planning activities should improvement decisions be made

In summary

OPM3 is a powerful tool that organizations can use to improve their organization project management maturity, and hence the execution of their projects and achieve strategic objectives of the organization.

The success of any implementation is never guaranteed: challenges seem to lurk around every corner.  As indicated in a prior blog (Structuring a Global Implementation) there are ways to anticipate and address these challenges before they materialize.  With a properly structured team, best practice solutions and standardized business processes, the implementation has a strong chance for success.

But what about rollout?  What about that phase after much of the hard work has been done, changes have been fought over and agreed to, and surprises have been uncovered and addressed in testing?  After all the headache and heartache (and heartburn), isn’t it better to just ‘get it over with’ and not prolong the pain to the enterprise and go ‘Big Bang’ as opposed to a Phased Approach? 

The implementation rollout can be done in an either big bang approach or in a phased manner. The big bang approach, which implies putting together the entire system in one stroke across the organization, is possible for mature companies having previous experience in similar projects and capable of managing huge organizational changes. 

In a phased implementation, a pilot run is conducted at a pre-selected site and after stabilization and lessons learned, it is rolled out for other locations. Learning from the initial deployment can be applied to subsequent deployments.  Using a train the trainer approach, trainers for subsequent deployments can get hands on experience in current deployments.

 The global template will be continuously modified to incorporate local statutory requirements.  The phased approach is manageable and less risky for many organizations. It is also important to sequence the ERP module implementations and align it to the company’s business objectives.

Some of the factors influencing the above approach decision are:

·         Availability of resources and capital

·         Time horizon on Return of Investment

·         Impact of customers/vendors

·         Limitations of current legacy systems

Availability of resources and capital will dictate how far you can ‘stretch’ your implementation team.  Your time horizon for ROI is the guideline for determining ‘how long this should take’ (and if done correctly has factored in your rollout approach).  The impact to your customers and vendors should be mitigated by your implementation strategy (ensuring customers are billed, cash is collected and vendors get paid).  The limitations of your current legacy systems imply that the systems are either slated to be retired or can no longer be supported, either from an IT or a usability standpoint. 

Project rollout can come at a time when most of your resources have ‘implementation fatigue’ and its significance is often overlooked:  all the hard work is done—now it’s time for a handoff, right?  Obviously, there is more to it, which tends to favor phasing your rollout in a way that best meets the demands of the enterprise.

Oracle Project Foundation

New Concurrent Process

• ADM: Purge Obsolete Projects Data.

 

iSetup

• New API to enable migration of setup entities across instances. iSetup also handles standard and comparison reporting of master entities in addition to data migration.

 Improved Diagnostics

• All R11i diagnostics scripts are now available for R12.1.1.  In addition, some new scripts have been added to support new R12.1.1 functionality and architecture changes.

 

Oracle Project Costing 

• Federal Budgetary Accounting for Project Expenditures via Subledger Accounting
• Contingency Worker Clearing Projects to allow CWK to charge multiple projects
• Additional Project Information in Oracle Time and Labor (Project Name and Task Name)

 

Oracle Project Billing 

• Cascading Billing Schedule Overrides from project to all tasks or top task to all tasks
• Agreement Definition Enhancements
  • Start Date
  • Customer order number and accounting reference
  • Billing sequence number
  • Advance Required checkbox
  • 15 additional descriptive flexfield attributes (bringing the total to 25)

Prepayment Receipt Applications

• Advance payment receipts entered in Oracle Receivables can now be associated with Agreements. “Apply Receipt” button allows the receipts to be associated with the Agreement.
• Receipts are automatically applied to the Project invoices when they are interfaced to Oracle Receivables.
• Allows cash to be identified to a specific agreement up front, and automatically draw down that cash balance.
• When the advance is required, total funding cannot exceed the amount of advance payments associated with the agreement.  Therefore billings cannot exceed advance amounts.
• A client extension is available to determine which customers are required to provide an advance payment. The advance required flag will be enabled or disabled for the Agreement. A new security function allows the flag to be overwritten.

 Federal Budgetary Accounting for Project Revenue

• Additional journal entries are available in Subledger Accounting for the required Federal Budgetary entries.

Date Effective Funds Consumption

• Project Type option that requires cost and event transaction dates to fall within the agreement start and end dates.
• Transactions are only billed against the agreement if the entire transaction amount can be funded (no partial recognition) for both revenue and invoicing.
• Without enabling this option, revenue generation supports partial billing for transactions.

 New Parameters for MGT: Invoice Review

• Project Status
• Project Closed After Date
• Project Range

New Parameters for MGT: Unbilled Receivables Aging

• Project Status
• Project Closed After Date
• Project Range

 

Oracle Project Management 

New Audit Process for Project Performance Reporting Setup

• AUD: Project Performance Reporting Setup

New Parameters for Refresh Project Performance Data Process

• Actual or All Amounts (Plan and Actual)
• Workplan Version
• Financial Plan Version

 

Workplan Enhancements

Ability to Delete Published Workplan Versions (except the latest published version, baseline version, and workplan versions included in a program hierarchy)

 Usability Enhancements

• Update Work Breakdown Structure page is now obsolete.
• View, maintain, and update a workplan structure from the Update Tasks page.
• Where no latest published workplan version exists, the current working version displays on the Update Tasks page when navigating to the Workplan Tasks.
• Indent or outdent multiple workplan tasks in a single step.
• Confirmation, information, and warning messages appear on HTML pages during Apply Latest Progress as well as the Submit Progress processes. Messages include status information during processing and the availability of the latest progress information.

 New Public API for Creating, Maintaining, and Deleting Programs

 

New set of public API procedures:

• Designate a project as a program and indicate whether projects linked to the program can belong to multiple programs.
• Create links from a program to one or more projects
• Update links from a program to one or more projects
• Delete links from a program to one or more projects

Budgeting And Forecasting Enhancements

 Enhanced Automatic Calculation and Derivation Logic

• For plan lines that do not have a specified a quantity, the amount is no longer copied to the quantity field with the rate value set to 1.
• Rate now has a lower precedence than quantity and amount in automatic calculations.  The rate will be re-derived when the quantity, rate and amount are entered at the same time for a plan line.
• When the burden multiplier is overridden by updates to the raw cost or burden cost, subsequent calculations of the burden cost will use the override burden multiplier.  The same is true when the markup percent is updated by changes to plan line components:  the override markup percentage will be used in revenue calculations.

Enhanced Handling of Override Rates on Budget / Forecast Lines

• Override rates for a planning transaction on Edit Budget and Edit Forecast pages.

o   Raw Cost Rate

o   Budened Cost Rate

o   Bill Rate

• Override rates are applied to all existing and new periodic lines for the planning transaction.
• Average rates fields on these pages are now disabled for entry and are used for display only.

 Simplified Addition of Planning Elements and Resources

• New but unbudgeted tasks and resources can be added to a budget or forecast version.
• Add either all new tasks and planning resources or new tasks only to the current plan version.

Self Service Expenditure Inquiry

• Ability to drill into expenditure details from the Financials tab.

 Reporting Pack for Generation and Distribution of XML Publisher Reports

• A reporting pack is a set of report templates and recipients by project role.
• The Generate Reporting Pack concurrent program emails the reports generated from the report templates based on pre-defined intervals.
• The report template establishes each report’s layout and content.
• New reports templates are configured using XML Publisher tools.
• New or modified reports can be added to an existing reporting pack or be used to create an entirely new report set.
• Predefined data definition files that contain XML tags for performance measures and project data are provided.

Predefined Reports:

• Project Change Document Report
• Project Committed Cost Report
• Project Cost Detail Report
• Project Cost Labor Report
• Project Cost Summary Report
• Project Earned Value Report
• Project Financial Summary Report
• Project Forecast Summary Report
• Project Revenue At Risk Report

Budget Integration with Federal Budget Execution and/or 3rd Party Budget

• The budget integration workflow supports integration with the Federal Budget Execution module..
• The workflow can be customized to interface budget lines to external budgeting applications.

Microsoft Project 2007 Certification

• Integration with Microsoft Project 2007 is supported.

Project Performance Reporting: Additional Measures

YTD, QTD and At Completion calculated measures are available on the following pages:

• Performance Overview Period-to-Date
• Summary/Analysis
• Task Summary/Analysis Resource Summary/Analysis

Project Performance Reporting: Inter-Project Revenue / Billing Amounts

Inter project revenue / billing amounts are available on the following pages:

• Project List View Workplan Cost
• Exception Reporting Performance Overview
• Task Summary/Analysis Resource Summary/Analysis
• Period-to-Date Summary/Analysis

 

Supplier Cost Dashboard

Subcontractor Payment Controls

Support for Pay when Paid Scenarios

• A new “Pay when Paid” payment term for subcontracts automatically places holds on all subcontractor invoices under that subcontract until the corresponding customer payment is received.
• Subcontract Payment Controls workbench allows project manager to manage the holds, with visibility into both the customer invoices and the related subcontractor invoices.
• Workflow notifications about the receipt of the customer payment allow the project manager to automatically or manually release the subcontract invoice.
• Associations between the customer invoices and the subcontractor invoices may be automatically maintained based on the billing of project expenditures for cost-plus contracts, or may be manually maintained for fixed price contracts.

Payment Controls for Subcontract Deliverables

• Support for the tracking and monitoring of subcontract deliverables that place automatic holds on subcontractor invoices in the case of noncompliance.
• Oracle Procurement Contracts allow a subcontract administrator to specify payment impact controls that will take effect when a subcontract deliverable is not met.
• From the Subcontractor Payment Controls workbench, the project manager can view a checklist of the all the current subcontract deliverables, to assist in evaluating the subcontractor status prior to releasing monthly progress payments.

Oracle Project Resource Management

Resource Search Enhancements

• Resource Search by Email Address
• Resource Search by Person Type
• Streamlined Navigation on Staffing Home

 Cross Validation of Project and Assignment Dates

• Requirement start dates are equal to or greater than the project start date and less than the project end date and that finish dates are equal to or less than the project end date but greater than the project start date.
• Assignments cannot be added beyond the project end date.
• A project team role end date cannot be beyond the project end date. If the roles are created before the project end dates are entered, users will receive an error if they later try to enter an end date that is earlier than the end date for existing roles.
• When project transaction dates are moved corresponding assignment dates are validated against the new project dates. If the new project transaction dates fall outside the dates for existing assignments, users are given an option to shift the assignment dates or cancel the date adjustment.

 Defaulting of Work Patterns’ From and To Dates

• Work pattern from and to dates will default from the requirement start and end dates.

Improved Exception Handling of Maintain Project Resources Process

• PRC: Maintain Project Resources delivers improved exception handling and notification when it encounters errors while processing employee records.

New Public APIs for Resource Management

The new PJR APIs fall into the following four categories:

• Requirement Public APIs
• Assignment Public APIs
• Candidate Public APIs
• Competence Public APIs

Organization Authority: Obsolete Forecast Authority

• Removes the forecast authority functionality from the organization authority form
• Removes existing security data relating to forecast authority.
• Replaces the PJR forecast functionality with the new HTML based forecasting functionality. The new forecasting functionality has its own security mechanism and does not honor the old forecast authority model.
• Improves the performance of security calls to organization authority because the existing security data is being removed.

Oracle Grants Accounting

Award Budgeting Enhancements

 Budget period validations

• Budget periods will not be validated across award budgets when those awards fund a single project.
• Flexibility to establish award budgets based on the actual duration of the award, while not being confined based on the existing budgets already established for the project.

 Automatic summarization of project budgets

• With the new budget period validations, automatically summarize to a project budget viewable in Project Status Inquiry.
• Two profile options have been added to identify the budget entry methods that will be used to summarize the project budgets.

 Budget Line Sorting Option

• Sort budget lines by Resource name, or by effective dates for budgets with date range periods.  Provides the flexibility to view the budget lines by period or by budgeted resource.

 Award Status Inquiry Enhancements

 View by budget period

• Allows the Find Award Status window to be limited to a single period, range of periods, or inception to date for a particular award.
• Reflects the budget periods entered on the award budget.

 GL and PA Date Parameters on Find Expenditure Items window

• GL and PA date parameters have been added to the Find Expenditure Items window.

 GL Date Parameters on Find Commitments window

• GL Date parameters have been added to the Find Commitments window.

Note: These notes were compiled from version 3.7 of the Oracle E-Business Suite Release Content Document for Projects

Project Managers’ Needs

Project Managers need tools to quickly and easily plan and execute project work.  They typically are used to working with Microsoft® Excel as their primary tool for maintaining every type of project data from WBS and Schedules to budgets, status reports, forecasts, issues and change orders. They even want to see all their reporting data in spreadsheets which in turn allow them to perform any type of analysis they need.  Furthermore, and especially in Professional Services organizations, they need access to project data “on the go” in a disconnected mode as the project managers are frequently travelling to client sites.

Oracle Project Management was one of the first generic project management software applications that was released pre-integrated with the back-office project accounting functions along with other ERP applications. It provides a comprehensive workbench for project managers allowing them to manage all their project information from one place. Being a generic off-the-shelf application, it, however, is burdened with complexity delivered via an HTML-based user interface that requires a significant investment in training to get the project managers comfortable with it. Most organizations cannot afford this investment in time from their project managers as they are already busy with ongoing projects. Furthermore, the HTML-based user interface, by necessity, requires a connection to the office intranet in order to access project data.

Enabling Project Managers

The Project Partners User Interface Applications (UI-Apps) are built to work seamlessly with Oracle Project Management and provide project managers with a simple MS-Excel based user interface with built-in industry specific processes for Engineering and Construction and Professional Services organizations.  The UI-Apps user interface allows for quick and easy retrieval of project information, the ability to update data either while connected to Oracle, or offline, and then a one click upload to Oracle to provide automatic updates back into Oracle Project Management.  Project managers generally would log into Oracle from MS-Excel whenever they’re connected to the office intranet, and download their project information to the UI-Apps worksheets.  They then save their worksheets to their local machines.

Project Managers can now go on the road and review and update information into the UI-Apps worksheets at anytime and, whenever they next connect to the office intranet, they can simply upload the updates back to Oracle. 

UI-Apps Functions

The initial release of UI-Apps covers the following PM functions:

* Build and Maintain Project WBS

   – Create, indent and outdent tasks

* Build and Maintain Project Schedules

   – Update task financial and schedule attributes

* Build and Maintain Project Budgets

   – Select and assign resources (based on resource format) from planning resource list

   – Automatically determine planned resource costs and revenue using cost, burden and bill rates from Oracle Projects

   – Plan in Project or Project Functional Currencies. UI-Apps automatically converts all rates downloaded to the Worksheets into the selected currency

   – Select a spread curve and automatically spread resource costs across PA/GL periods. Update individual periodic amounts and automatically maintain total planned amounts.

   – Save working and submit for approval (Baseline for Financial Plans and Publishing for Workplans)

* Capture Project Schedule Progress

   – Update Progress – Physical Percent Complete, Estimates to Complete, Task Progress status

* Update Project Financial Forecasts and Schedule Attributes

   – Update WBS – New tasks, task dates, other financial and schedule attributes

   – Review and Update Forecast – Review actual-to-date and maintain ETC/EAC amounts

   – Save Working – progress, Workplan Updates and Forecasts

   – Submit for Approval – Progress, Workplan changes and Forecasts.

* Review Project Costs

   – Review Cost summary by WBS and Cost Categories

This is accomplished via five MS-Excel worksheets that are delivered for handling time-phased and lump-sum plans, one sheet each for budgets and forecasts. One additional sheet is provided for reporting project costs by WBS and implementation defined cost groupings. 

Above and beyond the core functionality shown above, each of the sheets is also highly configurable.  A large selection of fields and table columns can be displayed or hidden based upon requirements.  Custom fields can also be displayed/updated providing the ability to save and retrieve customer-specific data back into Oracle Projects via Oracle-supported DFFs and/or UDAs.  Additionally, each worksheet can be configured with custom colors, fonts, prompt and column heading names and row/column sizes.

Deploying UI-Apps

The UI-Apps are delivered with pre-built configuration capabilities that allow the implementation team to quickly setup the worksheets to meet their business process and the worksheets adapt to the planning configurations from Oracle automatically. The look and feel of the worksheets can be rapidly adjusted to user requirements using built-in table configurations and standard MS-Excel formatting capabilities and various delivered extension points allow the implementation team to add data elements and custom business validations to the worksheets using easily available PL/SQL skills.

These various configuration options enable a rapid implementation cycle for the UI-Apps – 4-6 weeks after receiving the software.

All in all, UI-Apps enables project managers via built-in industry specific MS-Excel worksheets giving them a familiar user interface and enabling allowing them to manage better and deliver better profits.