“Technology professionals serving the engineering and construction industry should be aware of three major emerging trends in 2012,” said author Scott Bartlett.

The #1 Trend: Construction projects will continue to increase in complexity

The #2 Trend: Economic pressures will continue to force companies to work globally, with increased competition for the same projects

And the #3 Trend: Owners are demanding a more efficient way of turning over all documents at the end of a project

At Project Partners we see this same focus among our multi-national Engineering and Construction customers and are glad that Oracle’s products support these key trends.

You can read the full article here: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/profit/opinion/012312-sbartlett-1496768.html

Businesses of various shapes and sizes across the globe continue to invest in and expand the footprint of their ERP applications. Much of this increased spend includes mission critical projects such as

1) Upgrades

2) Deploying new applications and

3) Migrating new businesses, acquired companies, countries and/or re-engineered processes into an existing “corporate” ERP.

So how do these companies begin the process? What are the key considerations in play to complete these daunting tasks within an Oracle ERP environment?

Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Releases 11i and R12, and Oracle Fusion Applications – the significant majority of existing Oracle ERP customers use these 3 applications suites.

First the 11i customer. These customers are most likely represented in one (or more) of the following scenarios

1)     Will stay on Release 11i as long as they can because they see no ROI or strong business case to move to R12.

2)     The value of an R12 migration project is recognized, but not currently in the budget

3)     Users know the current applications (with known shortcomings) and will not accept or have time to participate in an upgrade project of this magnitude.

The R12 customer can most likely by categorized as

1)     Adopted R12 very early, completed one or more minor point release upgrades and are stable,

2)     Recently migrated to R12 and have stabilized their environment,

3)     R12 migration is underway.

And finally the Fusion customer can be depicted as

1)     Considering a net new Oracle implementation in the next 1-3 years

2)     Will sign up as an early adopter with a strong commitment and participation with Oracle

3)     Currently planning a very large global implementation project.

Wherever you find your organization described above, your project can be off to a great beginning by performing an Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Assessment.  Project Partners has delivered multiple assessments across our customer base to provide the focus, the strategic direction, roadmap and the assistance in business case development for your Oracle project. Project Partners has a proven and  repeatable approach which provides specific and relevant recommendations based on our key findings during the assessment scope of work. The work products of our assessment will provide customers with actionable and robust recommendations across multiple Oracle Applications suites, including Financials, Manufacturing and Projects, along with the inherent integration in other areas such as Human Capital Management and Time & Labor.

Organizations successfully working in Oracle EBS and other ERP environments have come to view a well-executed assessment as a critical first step in ERP project lifecycles.  The most competitive firms leverage the expansion of ERP into Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Human Capital Management, and Project Portfolio Management, and integration with Social Media and mobile technology.

This underscores the importance of conducting an Oracle EBS Assessment, which will show you how to get there.  Extending your Oracle EBS environment into these areas is the next wave for your Oracle ERP and neatly falls in line and in scope of a properly executed Assessment.

Let Project Partners be part of your Oracle EBS Assessment and we can begin to write your ERP Roadmap and Success Story together.  Contact us to positively impact your future.

On January 18th, I presented a webinar featuring a case study of a firm that is successfully using Oracle E-Business Suite Projects, Oracle Order Management and Oracle Receivables, and I showed how they manage their revenue.  This customer leverages R12.1.3 revenue management functionality for GAAP revenue recognition and uses EBS Projects with a different revenue recognition basis.  In this webinar I also showed how creative approaches to integrating Orders and Projects are possible with minimal development, that robust solutions support long term business needs while also providing flexibility for growth, and that simple approaches lead to the best long term solutions.

Sound interesting?  You can view the webinar here

Attend our Webinar and see it all, live.  Or view the recording later at your convenience. 

Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management Goes Mobile

To be presented live on November 3, 2011 by Tamim Kulaly, PMP

The latest release of Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management offers many significant enhancements, including a new mobile app that presently works on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch platforms. Plus a new streamlined architecture enables companies to more effectively plan and operate business processes. Join us and see all this in action.

Register here to attend the webinar on November 3rd or, later, to view the recording:

  http://www.projectp.com/resources/webinars.php

Why is This Webinar Important?

Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management offers Project Contracts features that are part of the Fusion Enterprise Contracts model. Fusion Project Contracts offers sell side contracts functionality that helps to drive revenue and billing independent of project setup and execution. This presentation highlights the core features including a flexible approach to billing by contract lines, contract level summaries, consolidated bill plans, billing controls, improved user interface and improved process efficiencies.

To Register or View the Recording: http://www.projectp.com/resources/webinars.php

For large construction projects, interest incurred during the construction period for borrowed capital is typically capitalized for the duration of project construction, until the Capital Asset is generated. In Oracle E-Business Suite Applications, the Capital Projects functionality supports these requirements. To utilize this functionality you would set up an Interest Schedule (similar to a Burden Schedule) and associate it with the project type of the Capital Project. This schedule provides for the association of interest name, interest rate for the organization and other relevant details for interest calculations, compounding effect, expenditure type exclusions, etc.

Oracle Projects generates the interest to be capitalized once per project for each General Ledger period. Based on the system linkage function of the expenditure type to be used for interest (generally it is the Miscellaneous type class), the appropriate auto accounting function and SLA need to be properly configured to ensure the interest capitalized gets posted in the GL appropriately.  Capitalization interest calculation is for the differential expenditure items on a cumulative basis, i.e. until the Construction In Process (CIP) is ready to be capitalized or Asset lines are ready to be generated. Once generated and transferred to Assets, the process stops generating interest on those expenditure items. Interest is capitalized at the same task level as the expenditure item.

For tasks that don’t have specific Asset Assignments, i.e. tasks used to accumulate Common Costs for the project, Oracle EBS Projects provides various allocation methods so that the Asset generation process does not create Unassigned Asset lines. The interest capitalization process is run at month end, before generating asset lines. The Asset line generation process does not show the interest capitalization amount in the CIP.

But the fact remains: your firm needs to meet its business goals and has bought or is considering buying Oracle EBS Applications because of the improved business performance that results from a successful implementation.

So how can YOU help your firm maximize the return on its software investment?

Here’s a great start: You can have your project managers and administrators trained on Oracle EBS Projects in 82% less time and spending 40% less time on a daily basis, using a familiar Microsoft® Excel front-end, ensuring rapid end-user adoption, and putting your company on the fast track to the many benefits provided by Oracle.

View this webinar and see how our User Interface Applications free up your firm’s employees to make more strategic contributions and achieve business objectives.

The functionalities relating to Contingent Workers (CWK) have been enhanced in Oracle E-Business Suite Applications R 12.1 and above. Prior to this release, there were limitations in effectively using CWK across multiple projects, if their PO does not reference these individual projects in its Distribution. Further, multiple concurrent associations of different Purchase Orders (with different rates, if applicable) and different projects referenced in its Distribution were not supported.

With the enhancement in R 12.1, CWK’s primary HR assignment can be associated with multiple concurrent POs. This association is done through a new URL associated with the HR assignment through a function call, and not in the Form. Further, a new Flag called “Contingent Worker Enabled” is introduced in the Project type so that for each Operating Unit a project could be created using this project type and referencing that project in the PO Distribution of the CWK. This ensures that when the CWK selects the PO that is associated with his HR assignment, OTL will allow the selection of any chargeable project. Also, by selecting any other associated PO, CWK can charge the applicable project(s) referenced in its Distribution. This way, standard rates for all projects through a specific PO and unique rates for specific projects through specific PO could be used and OTL validation is facilitated.

While these functionalities are standard in R 12.1, they don’t quite work this way yet. Multiple POs can be associated. However, the process of selecting and validating the PO and the projects in OTL still has issues.

Oracle Development released a patch 12411973 to fix the issues and it still doesn’t work.

These features are very eagerly awaited by many customers. Stay tuned to hear the update on this.

The Oracle® E-Business Suite Project Management application (PJT) integrates with Microsoft® Project out-of-the-box to provide for bi-directional integration between Oracle E-Business Suite Projects and Microsoft Project (MSP). This provides for downloading the project structure and current working version of the project from Oracle and updating them in MSP to create the detailed workplan structure, together with resource assignments and resource scheduling.

As part of the download process, we download the Planning Resource List defined in PJT that includes the Team Role, Jobs, etc. Typically, the workplan planning and scheduling is done in Microsoft Project at the work breakdown structure (WBS) level for the team role and their requirements are scheduled accordingly. The updated WBS and resource plan is then uploaded back into Oracle Projects through the MSP integration. This process creates the update to the current working version of the workplan and creates the resource assignments. Workplan costs and other details can then be reviewed and the current version can be published and baselined.

The published, baselined workplan can be integrated with Financial Plans and Forecast generation (for costs and revenue) in PJT, and with Oracle E-Business Suite Project Resource Management, through “bottom up” integration. Bottom up integration defines a project level resource requirement from the workplan resourcing created through the MSP upload. This process creates the project team role requirement automatically at the project level. Thereafter, you can use the standard functionalities of Oracle Project Resource Management’s integration with Oracle Time and Labor to track the team role name for Actuals and for effective forecasting of Estimated Total Cost in the Mass Update Progress pages of Workplan.