Project Partners Blog

By Jason Ames, PMP and Kimberly McDonald Baker

Continuing our discussion from the prior blog article, we are now ready to address success factor number 2 in the Key Drivers to EPPM Success.

All Business Systems Talk to Each Other

An Enterprise Project Portfolio Management system is one of many business systems that an organization may use to improve its operations, but it must not live in a vacuum. An organization’s projects touch accounting through project costs and expenditures. Projects touch engineering through cost and material estimating, drawing releases and change orders. Service projects are affected when scheduling client engagements.

There are countless other examples of how the suite of business tools that organizations possess are dependent on information contained in other systems. The question to ask is, how do they communicate? Too often organizations require functional employees to “fat finger in data” for one business system while another person in another function enters that same data in another system. When this works perfectly an organization is losing resource hours – but most often mistakes are made and incorrect information is entered into one or more business system. Mistakes like this are completely avoidable with todays integrated business systems, as most offer an open architechure to allow for an easy flow of data. At the very least they contain the ability to import and export information in a way that can be easily read by another system.

By integrating business systems, an organization ensures data reliability while reducing redundancy and freeing up resources to focus on other significant areas of added value, such as maturing the project management practices of the organization.

Reference this Project Partners article for an indication of the financial benefits gained by maturing your project management practices: Return on Investment! Building the Business Case for Professional Services Automation and Project Portfolio Management.

By Jason Ames, PMP and Kimberly McDonald Baker

Too often organizations make an investment in an Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) system but they fail to recognize the full benefits. One of the reasons is that people fail to see an enterprise PPM solution as more than just a scheduling tool.

When used properly, however, an EPPM system can be a critical factor in driving business value, not only by making sure a project stays on schedule but also via ensuring that the right projects are selected, resources are used efficiently and decision makers have the information they need to drive corporate strategy.

Key Drivers of EPPM Success

1. Top down commitment, bottom up participation
2. All business systems talk to each other
3. Measuring what’s important
4. Determining which projects to start and when to shut them down
5. Finding the bottlenecks
6. Constant learning

This series of blog articles will address each of the above success factors. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ravi Shankar, PgMP, PMP, PMI-RMP and PMI-SP

Oracle E-Business Tax delivers comprehensive functionalities that address the unique requirements of tax calculations, processing, accounting and reporting requirements in the different feeder applications. No longer are tax features defined and configured in the respective modules and applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite Payables, Oracle Receivables, and Oracle Projects.  The Oracle E-Business Tax module provides for a central repository to define and hold the tax contents and records for the requirements of the modular applications. Tax services are provided to the needs of e business suite through a two way effective interchange of transaction and tax data between the applications and the robust tax engine that resides in Oracle E-Business Tax. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ravi Shankar, PgMP, PMP, PMI-RMP and PMI-SP

Oracle Report Manager is an online report distribution system that provides a secure and centralized location to produce and manage point-in-time reports. Report producers submit, publish, and set security for reports. Report consumers view and approve reports. Reports can be published and presented to certain responsibilities without additional security or a variety of security models can be applied, allowing only authorized users to view entire reports or parts of reports. In addition, we can use specific templates to integrate reports displayed by Report Manager using the organization’s individual style. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ravi Shankar, PgMP, PMP, PMI-RMP and PMI-SP

Oracle Advanced Global Intercompany System (AGIS) is a powerful application designed to handle the complex Intercompany accounting and processing requirements of global corporations. It has been designed and built using the OA Framework that is easy to use, and yet very sophisticated and rich in feature sets. It leverages the core building blocks of R 12 architecture in the areas of Legal Entity, Trading Community Architecture, Sub Ledger Accounting for Transaction Account Definition, workflow integration for processing and Approvals Management Application(AME) for transaction approval. The greatest benefit of the application is its ease of use for multiple companies belonging to different legal entities and Primary Ledger(s) across the globe that shares the same Oracle Application instance. Read the rest of this entry »

By Robert D. Anderson, CPA

This blog article is a continuation of the June 7 article.

Financial Focus

It is important to note the development of the analytic package was done by the Oracle OBIEE team and did not include the assistance of the Oracle Project Development group.  As a result of this development approach, some items viewed as important by heavy project users, such as Engineering and Construction firms, are not included in the initial release of Project Analytics. 
Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Ames

Primavera’s Project Portfolio Management suite is known for its ability to help you manage your projects and reduce the risk of project failure. But did you know that with Primavera P6 v7 Web Client you can use predefined workflow templates to request new projects? The project request process is extremely important because each new project not only represents an opportunity to help a company grow, every new project has an impact on every other project occurring in the organization. Each new project utilizes a company’s time, money and resources and should contribute to the company’s strategic goals and ultimately to the company’s bottom line.

Utilizing the Primavera project initiation work flow in P6 v7 web access, you can greatly improve your project selection process via the steps below.  Read the rest of this entry »

At last month’s Collaborate 10 conference, Project Partners delivered several presentations. Next week we’ll be presenting an encore of one of the most popular, via a free webinar. Read the rest of this entry »

Since January, Project Partners consultants, both in the US and in India, have had the privilege of working on-site with Oracle to test the Fusion Applications. An absolute win-win situation for everyone involved. It is our chance to see the live product in action, to test, test and test again to insure quality and to get hands-on experience and training using the best-of-the-best in Projects Applications. In exchange, Oracle receives a tremendous amount of feature validation, field expertise, and knowledge from those of us who live and breathe the world of Projects every day. This early look at the product before all the code is frozen helps guarantee the quality release we have all been waiting for.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Robert D. Anderson, CPA

During the last two years, Project Partners has been approached by several firms who run Oracle Order Management and now want to implement Oracle E-Business Suite Projects applications to provide a project-level profit and loss view, as well as contract and client profitability across the firm. Generally this request is happening at the same time the firm is undergoing massive growth and management wants it done quickly so they can get a handle on the growth that is happening and make sure it is profitable or identify problem areas quickly so action can be taken to prevent serious impact to the overall business.

The Oracle E-Business Suite Project Management module (PJT) does not create transactions but provides several tools to allow the tracking of financial transactions that are happening in the Project Costing and Project Billing applications. In addition, it offers both direct tracking in the tool and integration with project management tools, such as Microsoft Project Standard Edition and Primavera P6, as well as an open interface to interact with other similar management and scheduling tools in the market. Since the financial, resource and schedule information all resides in Oracle, the ability to leverage Key Performance Indicators and grouping them into Key Performance Areas, progress tracking and status reporting all combine to offer a strong tool to present the exceptions out of large volumes of data so the firm can take appropriate action at an early stage in the work. Read the rest of this entry »