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

The key benefit of Report Manager in R 12 is that the report can be directly viewed and opened in Excel (as against earlier releases wherein it can be viewed only in PDF or html).

The following are the key benefits and highlights of using Report Manager.

• It provides a centralized report distribution system for point-in-time reports.
• It enables information producers to submit and publish Financial Statement Generator (FSG), Ad Hoc FSG, Variable Format, and Standard reports to a central repository.
• It enables information producers to present reports in the repository to end users via menu items on the Oracle Apps Home page or portal.
• It is accessible by any Oracle Applications user using a Web browser.
  It offers approval requirement before making reports available for general viewing.
• It permits report availability in a future timeframe.
• Reports can be opened and viewed in PDF, html or Excel formats.
• It secures reports by utilizing security paradigms.
• It provides an archive facility to maintain reports for future reference that no longer need to be displayed.
• It enables the publishing of reports that have been submitted as part of request sets or report sets.
• It enables the uploading of any type of file and publish it to a central repository. Reports in the repository can then be distributed to the Apps home page.

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.

Once the Intercompany accounting and relationship is setup in the respective Primary Ledgers for the various transacting trading partners, the application elegantly processes the transactions and creates the accounting. Distribution account defaulting for the Initiator and Recipient can be automated through configurations in the Transaction Account Definition Window of sub ledger accounting and assignment to the respective Primary Ledgers. Transactions can be entered online in the application or loaded using WebADI integrator.

Approval of the Intercompany transaction is key to further processing in the respective ledger(s). Depending on whether invoicing is required or not, the journal is sent to the respective General Ledger(s) or to the Initiator’s and Recipient’s Receivables and Payables Module, respectively. Transaction access is secure using the Role Based Access Control model at the Organization level. The application provides for effective reconciliation of transactions with drill down features to identify the differences between the processed Receivable and Payable transactions of the respective trading partners .AGIS needs to be properly configured to harness its rich features. Further, additional care needs to be exercised in certain setups to ensure that the application behaves as intended, as these are either not clearly documented and or learnt based on implementation experience.

Improving the collaboration on a project can significantly raise the probability of project success. The question is how can you improve team collaboration and ensure every team member is on the proverbial same page. Primavera features a number of tools to aid the collaboration process. This article includes screenshots to facilitate your understanding of these tools.

The first step in collaboration is ensuring all team members are on the same page of the playbook. Imagine an (American style) football team where half the offense thinks they are going to pass and the other half thinks they are going to run (for non-football fans, take our word on this, it is bad). The same holds true with your projects. When team members don’t know what they should be working on, the only likely outcome is someone getting sacked. With Primavera’s P6 v7 Web Project, team members can easily see what tasks they are assigned per project and when those tasks are scheduled to be completed.

Primavera P6 Team Member Screenshot

Document Review Screenshot

Screenshot of Primavera Workspace

Primavera P6 Progress Reporter

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. 

As you review the items included in the last graphic from last week’s blog, note the focus areas all have a financial slant.  All the delivered functionality is taken from the core Project Accounting applications of Project Cost and Project Billing.  No data elements from Resource Management or Project Management are included.  The purpose of this webinar is to provide assurance this can be handled and all the needed information can reside within the OBIEE warehouse.  Project Partners can help you with this.

Oracle Project Analytics provide robust analysis of project-based forecasts, budgets, cost, revenue, billing and profitability data elements.  It is integrated with the other OBIEE analytics to deliver cross-functional analysis of project related data in areas such as accounts receivable, accounts payable, invoice aging or status of procurement transactions by project.  The pre-built ETL, DW, Dashboards, Reports, Metrics, KPI’s and Business User Tools support the use of data across the active PBIEE installed components.

Data provided by Oracle Project Analytics

What’s Included

Oracle delivers a very robust set of dashboards, reports and metrics across three primary groupings, as shown in the following graphic.

Oracle Project Analytics Includes Over 500 Metrics

Business Roles of Users

Oracle further defines the business roles that would use each of the pre-defined roles, as shown in the following graphic.

Roles of Oracle Project Analytics Users

Interaction with Microsoft(R) Office Suite

Oracle Project Analytics offers integration with Microsoft Office Suite.  One of the more powerful features, from the perspective of the Projects area,  is the ability to automate the period updating of the project review decks used across hundreds of firms every cycle (weekly, monthly, quarterly) and by various levels within the organization.  To use this functionality, there are several steps you you must first complete, and I’ll discuss those in the webinar.  For now, take a look at the exciting screenshot below.

Integration of Microsoft Office Suite and Oracle Project Analytics

Learn Much More

Learn more by attending the free webinar. Register to attend here.

On June 22, 2010 I will be delivering an encore of my OAUG Collaborate 10 Presentation titled Using Oracle Project Analytics within Engineering and Construction Firms.  You can register to attend the webinar here.

The webinar is packed with information, and you’ll get more out of the session if you do a little pre-reading first. Therefore, I will cover some of the introductory material via blog articles published over the next two weeks. 

Defining OBIEE

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) is a data ware house solution made up of a comprehensive suite of enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) products which deliver a full range of BI capabilities.  These include interactive dashboards, full ad hoc, proactive intelligence and alerts, enterprise level reporting, real-time predictive and actionable intelligence, disconnected analytics and much more.

There are nine items that comprise the core of the OBIEE solution, as shown in the following graphic.

Oracle OBIEE Components

These tools deliver all the dashboards, reports, drill down features, printing, sharing, downloading, ad hoc analysis tools, publishing tools, and data presentation schemes from tables to bubble charts and much more.

This functionality resides in multiple applications residing across three primary levels of the Tech Stack.  These areas are, from bottom to top:

1. Physical Layer
2. Semantic Object Layer
3. Presentation Layer

The architecture layers and components are shown in the following graphic.

Oracle OBIEE Architecture

We will address the changes needed to the various levels when adding new data metrics, updating reports and dashboards.  This structure supports all the analytic models and the changes discussed in this whitepaper apply to the other analytic models as well.

Analytics

The primary analytic packages are shown in the following image.

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite

Focus

Our webinar will focus on the first column in the above chart: Projects.

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. 

First: Standardize the project request process. Primavera allows system administrators to create custom project request templates and mandate project request criteria including a spending and benefit plan.

Primavera Project Request Template

Second: Route requests to the groups affected by the new project.  How often have you begun a new project only to find out that a key group was unaware of the requirements? With the new Primavera workflow you can select approvers at each stage of the process either by manually selecting them or route requests automatically by project code.

Define Stages in Primavera Workflow

Third: Collaborate with the project selection team.  Also included with Primavera web is a collaboration engine which allows teams to share and review documents as well as identify potential issues for each new project.  Documents can be shared via the Primavera collaboration engine or by linking to Microsoft Sharepoint or Oracle’s Unified Content Management System.

Primavera Project Request Collaboration

Once the project approval process is completed it is placed in the specified Enterprise Project Structure node and you can begin building your project plan.

Automation of business processes via Primavera workflows is the most effective way to enable organizations to manage and prioritize projects based on pre-defined criteria.

Contact Project Partners for additional details: sales@projectp.com

Reporting Options for Oracle E-Business Suite Projects

Users of the Oracle E-Business Projects applications have many options for Project Reporting, Management Reporting and Administrative Reports. This webinar will discuss the pros and cons of  Oracle BI Publisher, Oracle Project Status Inquiry, Oracle Daily Business Intelligence, Oracle OBIEE, Oracle Projects Reporting Pack, and Project Partners Reporting.

Sample reports from each of these reporting options will be shown and discussed, followed by live Q&A.

Register here

An article by Adam Bookman provides an interesting perspective on why about 68% of IT projects fail to deliver the original desired benefits. He quotes from a study done by the Standish Group that identifies three primary reasons:
1. The initiative was outsourced to IT and not owned by the business
2. The right tool drives success
3. Best Practices represent the best starting place

Looking back over 20 years in the Accounting and Finance role at major US firms and another 14 years consulting with large international companies, these findings agree with my observations. The most successful initiatives have always been the ones where people in the direct operational area take full ownership and IT plays a supporting rule. The worst initiatives have been the ones solely driven by IT with no business buy in.

In 1987 the power of business ownership on initiatives was driven home to me in a strong way. I was Controller for a small, privately held, manufacturing firm in Minnesota. We needed massive change to our current business processes. Our core business was delivering fund raising items for unique events; we delivered on time about 57% and late for the event almost half the time….talk about problems collecting the money!

The entire business leadership team went off for training on what we wanted to do and then led early morning/after work training classes to teach each and every employee in the company what the new business process entailed, their specific part of the plan and, perhaps most importantly, why we were doing it. When you have the President, and owner, of the company along with the Controller and VP Manufacturing, among others, up front leading the class, you get people’s attention. I was amazed as we began to see the benefits to the business before we did anything with the software. It was wonderful to watch the business transform. Once we put the tools in place, it was easier for the people to accomplish, but the tools were secondary to the success of the effort. We achieved over 97% on time within 6 months and dropped well over 15% from our cost of production.

Having worked as a software consultant now for almost 15 years, I have had the opportunity to see both large international firms and small local operations implement solutions. Universally, the ones that are driven by business leaders succeed and the ones driven by IT struggle to meet their objectives.

In the last few years I have watched a disturbing trend develop in implementation projects. Firms are moving away from implementations driven by business leaders and consultants with the business knowledge. They are being replaced with the low cost IT consultant who comes in and sets up the system so it works. This failure to address the business processes and getting business leadership to drive the deployment and own the effort is a guarantee for failure to achieve the desired outcome.

The second item reflects the success of marketing by the major software companies. The “buy this latest tool” approach has generated significant growth and made several people very wealthy. In several animal studies researchers have found many animals, from primates to dolphins and birds, have the ability to leverage a tool in problem solving. All too often we seem to lose sight of the reason we use tools at work…it is to solve business problems! A very useful tool can have a negative impact if not applied correctly or used by an untrained person. Think about the wonderful things a carpenter can build with a hammer, screw driver, drill and saw. Now think about putting that in the hands of your dentist to use during your next visit. A growing number of firms are doing that very scenario with their approach to software implementation.

The third item is the companion to the second, if I use “best practices”, I have to be successful…these are the best practices used by everyone! When dealing with a company that has very poor internal practices, no process to capture lessons learned and continuous process improvement and it’s everyone for themselves, may the best hero win approach to business, there is no way the best tool and best business practices will make it past the doorway of the project team room.

You must do the following:

• Make an assessment of where the company is with regard to internal skills.
• Identify what is needed to be successful in this specific business area – remember, not every firm needs to be running space craft design projects. The cost of doing this new process needs to match the benefits of the process improvement.
• Map a path from today’s capability to tomorrow’s desired ability.
• Execute the path in a steady and methodical way, evaluating the progress made and update the path, as needed, based on the reality encountered.

In June 2000 I had the opportunity to begin an engagement in Beijing, China, for a major international electronic manufacturing firm. During my initial meetings with the executive leadership team, we were discussing the role of a project manager, and I asked what they felt the most important activity was for this role today. The response was “Take the client to Disney World”! After a series of internal meetings across all levels, we determined a path that included new people in the role, extensive project management training classes and, at the end, the deployment of some tools to help them do the newly defined job of project manager.

In April 2005 I have the opportunity to return and see how the original business change worked out. It was amazing to see the strong professional project management team who was now deploying their knowledge across other Asia locations, including Japan and India. They grew into the strong organization by consistently applying the principles they learned.

Project Portfolio Management is a journey, not a destination. It will not be achieved by a single “big bang” software implementation, but by a steady, measured, application of sound principles that are adapted to the specific needs of your business. A combination of the right internal people and a solid business consultant can put in place the right business practices, which also leverage appropriate tools, to drive change in your business and place your initiatives into the successful column!