Project Partners Blog

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 »

Join Project Partners and Oracle Corporation on Wednesday, February 24 for a free, live webinar to learn about Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture (AIA) solution for integrating Oracle Primavera and Oracle E-Business Suite applications.  You’ll gain valuable information about how this solution will help their organization bring E-Business Suite and Primavera silos together. Read the rest of this entry »

By Peter Budelov

Project Managers (PMs) lead a hectic life because they not only need to manage the day-to-day operations of a project (i.e. work deliverables, schedules, cost and revenue), but they also must spend time with the appropriate IT tools to do this.  The keystone in making good project management decisions is having accurate, timely and easy to access project reporting data. 

Typically when using enterprise project management applications, this data is available, but not necessarily easy to get to, may not be easily displayed in a user friendly manner, does not necessarily have all the data needed, is not configurable, and certainly unavailable in a disconnected mode. Read the rest of this entry »

Oracle provides a strong resource with its recommended patch lists (RPL).  However, Project Partners is pleased to provide a  detailed list of patches that we have uncovered, either during implementations or as a result of internal testing. 

As with any patch you should always do detailed research so you can find the patch number and a description of the patch.  It is always important to investigate the patches completely, understand their compatibility with those you have already applied and how they might impact your environment, especially where customizations are concerned.  This is where the importance of testing your functionality comes into play.

With that said, below is some very useful ‘insider information’ for your review. Read the rest of this entry »

Challenges

Determine if you have a demand or supply oriented environment

• Demand resource management is more prevalent with internal resource organizations, i.e. IT organizations. The primary focus is to assure that resources are optimally allocated to projects in keeping with the organization’s stated goals and objectives. Or, in other words managing the problems of “everybody is over-booked” or “there’s more work than resources”.
  
• Supply resource management tends to be more attuned to billable professional resources. The primary focus is in balancing staff retention, skill mix and gross margins by assuring that resources are optimized to their maximum capacity. Or in other words “Is everybody billable?” or “Do we have enough analysts or too many designers?”
  
• Professional services and other resource intensive organizations may have both issues at the same time Read the rest of this entry »

There is no cookie-cutter definition of an engineering-construction (E&C) company other than they are all project-oriented businesses who perform construction-related work for a client (often referred to as the owner – the entity paying for the work and for whom the work is performed). There are those who perform design-only work (engineering), construction-only work, or design-build work (a combination of both).

Engineering companies are essentially professional services organizations who specialize in providing engineering-design solutions to clients – often in specialized fields.

Construction companies can generally be classified as either (a) contractors who perform all or most of the work themselves, or (b) subcontractors, who perform specialized work such as electrical, mechanical, or masonry tasks. General contractors (GCs) are contractors who perform many different types of work (even engineering services), often manage overall aspects of large (sometimes global) projects – referred to as construction-management (CM), and usually have access to large bonding resources.

Special cases are owner-CM, or owner-performed work. In the former, an owner (such as a large natural resources company, a government entity, or a specialty retailer) may act as a GC who subcontracts most or all of the work on a project to others, but manages the overall work themselves (CM). In the latter case, owners may have the people and equipment resources to actually perform some of the work rather than contracting it to others.

This article is a discussion of solutions for general contractors who use Oracle Project Management and Project Partners User Interface Applications in the execution of design-build projects. Future papers will focus on the other members of the E&C family. Read the rest of this entry »

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:

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

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.