Project Partners Blog

The information below provides an overview of the reporting and metrics available in Project Analytics for Project Executives. The pages have been configured to use Quarters; however, Period could have been configured as the ‘time grain’ instead. The information on each tab in the Project Executive area has been taken from the Dashboard Index. Additional information below each of the screenshots describe details of the metrics and functionality within each of the interactive dashboard pages.

Project Executive

Screenshots of the default dashboard for each tab within the Project Management reporting area are shown below. Results in the dashboards can be filtered using the parameters at the top of each dashboard (Fiscal Year, Fiscal Quarter, Fiscal Period, PA Period, Business Unit, Organization, Project Manager Name, Project Class, Project Type, Program Name, Project Name, and Service Type). Additional query modifications are available using the ‘Modify’ link.

2.1 – Overview

Provides the default aggregated view of information for all the organizations satisfying the dashboard filter criteria, with the ability to drill down to project details that each organization responsible for. This dashboard page provides quick overview of Inception-to-date performance, variances, and the number of projects that each organization is currently executing and their profitability and cost performance.

ITD Performance (Forecast, Budget and Actual) by Quarter and Organization uses Views (Chart, ITD Data, and ITD Variance) to display the information. You can drill thru to Project Invoice Aging as well as to Project Commitments. The graphs include ITD Margin %, Cost, Revenue Margin, Forecast Cost, Forecast Revenue, Forecast Margin and Forecast Variance.

 

Projects in Progress uses Dimensions (Organization and Project Type) to Display (Chart or Table) the number of ongoing projects. Changing the Dimension changes the display for the charts adjacent and those listed immediately below. Project Health by Margin Performance Displays (Chart or Table) the health of the projects with accumulated revenue (On Track, At Risk, Critical).

Profitability Summary by Organization Displays (Chart or Table) the margin percentages of the projects. Revenue Amounts and Margin Amounts represent the axes of the graph. Cost Performance by Organization Displays (Chart or Table) Percentage Cost Variance by the Dimension selected. You can drill thru to Cost Budget Details by Organization.

 

2.2 – Profitability Management

Provides the detailed profitability information for the organizations and the projects under the organizations with the ability to drill down to projects, 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 with the ability to drill down to the project, task and resource details.

Actual Profitability by Organization, Project Class, Project Type allows you to report by Project Organization (show above), Project Class, Project Type or Program. You can View the information by Margin Percentage, Margin, Revenue, Cost and Data. Above, Actual Margin Percentage is compared to QAGO (one quarter prior) and Actual Margin. You can drill thru to Actual Profitability Year Over Year by Organization.

Forecast Profitability by Organization, Project Class, Project Type allows you to report by Project Organization (above), Project Type, Project Class, and Program Name. Forecast Margin Percentage by Project Organization is displayed above. You can drill thru to YTD Profitability by Organization.

Profitability by Top Job Codes Displays (Chart or Table) Margin Percentages for all the Top Job Codes. You can click on the link to view Profitability for all Job Codes.

Profitability by Top Customers Displays (Chart or Table) Margin Percentages for the top customers. You can display Profitability for all Customers as well.

 

Actual Profitability Trend by Fiscal Period uses Views (Trend, Revenue Distribution, Cost Distribution, Margin Distribution and Data to report Actual Margin Percentage, Actual Revenue and Actual Cost. Margin Change Quarter Over Quarter Trend by Organization uses Views (Margin Percentage Change, Margin Change, and Data) to report quarterly margin changes.

Profitability Details by Project Organization Summarizes (Project Organization, Project Class, Project Type, or Program) Revenue Budget, Cost Budget, Actual Revenue, Actual Cost, Actual Margin, Actual Margin Percentage, Forecast Revenue, Forecast Cost, Forecast Margin, Actual/Cost Budget Variance, and Forecast/Budget Cost Variance.

 

2.3 – Cost Management

Provides the detailed cost information for the organizations and the projects under the organizations with the ability to drill down to projects, tasks and resources. It provides the cost comparisons of organizations, programs, expenditure categories, and cost variances by top projects, top resources, including trending with the ability to drill down to details.

Actual Cost by Organization by Financial Resource uses Dimensions (Expenditure Category, Project Organinzation, Project Type, Program, and Supplier Name to Display (Chart or Table) Total Cost, Raw Cost, Burden Cost, People Cost, Equipment Cost, Billable Cost, Non-Billable Cost, Capitalizable Costs and Expenses. You can also drill thru to Actual Efforts by Organization by Financial Resource.

Cumulative Cost Variance by Top Projects Displays (Chart or Table) ITD cost variances for your top projects. You can view this information for all projects via Cumulative Cost Variance by Project. Cumulative Cost Variance by Top Resource displays variances for top resources. All resources may be viewed via Cumulative Cost Variance by Resource.

Actual Total Cost, Billable Cost Trend by Fiscal Quarter displays Cost, Billable Cost, Non-Billable Cost, and Billable Cost Percentage by quarter. You can click on the Fiscal Quarter to view Cost Trends. This information is displayed in tabular and graphical format.

You can drill thru to Cumulative Cost Billability by Project, Cumulative Cost Variance by Project, People Effort Trend by GL Period, Cumulative Cost Trend by Fiscal Period, and Cost Transactions.

 

Cost Trend by Fiscal Period has two Views (Summary by Fiscal Period, Details by Project) of Current Cost Budget, Forecast Cost, Billable Cost, Non-Billable Cost, Actual Cost, Cost Percentage Spent, Cost Variance and Cost Variance Percentage. The information is display both in tabular and graphical format.

2.4 – Revenue Management

Provides the detailed Revenue, Billing and Funding information for the organizations and the projects under the organizations with the ability to drill down to projects, tasks and resources. It provides revenue, billing and funding comparisons of organizations, customers, and programs, and revenue performance by top projects, top customers including trending with the ability to drill down to details.

Revenue by Organization by Customer uses Dimensions (Customer, Revenue Category, Project Organization, and Program) to Display (Charts or Tables) to compare Revenue to Bill Amounts. In the table format, you can click on Project Organization to drill to Project or Project Manager details. Unearned Revenue vs Unbilled Receivables shows these amounts by the dimension selected.

 

Revenue by Project Location initially displays the information by Country. You can click on the country to view revenue details by Project State and Project City. You can drill thru to Revenue Trend by Project Location by Fiscal Quarter.

Revenue by Top Customers by Top Projects allows you to select Dimensions (Customer or Project Name) to Display (Chart or Table) Margin and Margin Percentage by the dimension selected.

 

Revenue Trend by Fiscal Period allows you to choose a View (Summary by Fiscal Period or Details by Project) Current Budget Revenue, Forecast Revenue, Revenue Amount, Bill Amount, Unbilled Receivables, and Unearned Revenue. The information is displayed in table and graphical format. You can drill thru to Cumulative Revenue Trend by Fiscal Period, ITD Actual Revenue Details by Organization, and Revenue Transactions.

 

Funding Details by Organization displays Initial Funding Amount, Additional Funding Amount, Adjustment Funding Amount, Cancelled Funding Amount, and Net Funding amount by Project Organization. Remaining Funding Amount by Organization for Active Projects displays Project Organization, Customer, Funding Amount, Revenue Amount, Remaining Funding Amount, and Remaining Funding Amount Percentage in a table.

Lost Funding Amount for Closed Projects shows Project Organization, Customer, Funding Amount, Revenue Amount and Lost Funding Amounts. You can also drill thru to Remaining Funding Not Started by Organization or to Agreement Summary by Organization.

 

Summary

The Project Executive area of Project Analytics provides those users whose organizations are responsible for running projects the appropriate level of visibility into the type of information they need to effectively manage and forecast results for the enterprise. And since the pages are interactive, managers can focus on the metrics that are meaningful to the organization and download that information as needed.

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:

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

Large project based organizations working in a multi-national, multi-currency environment struggle with how best to deal with currency issues when managing projects and reporting project and organization financial performance.

When dealing with currencies in a project environment, the following types of currencies come into play:

1. Functional Currency: The currency in which the financial books are maintained
2. Contract Currency: The currency in which the contract for the project is written
3. Project Currency: The Currency in which the project is managed. This may be different from the functional currency and very often may even be the contract currency.
4. Cost Currency: The currencies in which cost is incurred.
5. Revenue Currency: The currency in which revenue is accrued, this very often is the functional currency in which the project is setup.
6. Invoice Currency: The currency in which the project is to be invoiced.
7. Reporting Currency: This is the one currency in which all financial information across all projects is consolidated for management reporting.

Project based organizations run the gamut on the maturity scale in dealing with currencies. Some organizations are taking the first steps in expanding beyond current national boundaries and the issues involved keep them within their current currency boundary and they tend to execute solely in their primary currency only. On the other end of the scale are experienced multi-nationals that execute projects requiring serious hedging of currencies in order to maintain their margins.

Today we will address organizations from the lower end of the scale to those somewhere in the middle. In order to execute and manage effectively, the following currency setups are suggested for projects:

1. Project Currency = Functional Currency: This removes 1 level of complexity from the project manager’s plate and allows them to manage the project without the additional burden of currency management.
2. The Contract and Invoice Currencies should be as specified by the client. This is something that is typically negotiable with the client to determine who incurs the currency risk, the project organization or the project client.
3. The Budget Currency should be the project/functional currency and all budget v/s actual variances should also be managed in the project currency. This makes the budgeting process easier.
4. Costs may be accrued in any currency and revenue should be incurred in the functional currency to keep things nice and simple.

In light of this setup, let’s tackle reporting at two levels: single project reporting and organizational reporting.

Single Project Reporting
Reporting for a project is primarily for project management purposes and hence all financial reporting for the project manager should be provided in the project/functional currency. As budgets and forecasts are also defined in the project/functional currency, it makes all variance reporting easy.

Organization Reporting
Reporting for project organizations is typically accomplished in the following currencies:

1. Functional Currency: This works well for organizations (and rollups) that are within a currency boundary.

2. Global Reporting Currency: This is a currency in which financial information is consolidated across currency boundaries for management reporting. This currency is typically set to the currency in which the organization maintains it’s primary or management offices.

Setup and Maintenance of Global Reporting Currency
1. As mentioned above, the functional currency of the organizations main office location should be setup as the global reporting currency for ease of management reporting.

2. Exchange rates for converting projects from other currencies to the Global Reporting currency should ideally be setup with

a. Conversion rates to the global reporting conversion should be setup as fixed rates for any given year. This allows management and project managers to measure the performance of the project without including variances due to currency fluctuations.

b. Conversion rates will also be needed for future months/years in order to convert budget and forecast amounts for projects. These future amounts should be refreshed yearly based on the latest rates at the end of a given fiscal year. This may require budget/forecast amounts to be reconverted to use the new rates.

Any variations from the management reporting numbers so derived will differ from the financial numbers from the official books due to exchange rate variances.

Following this simplified approach allows any project organization to expand into international arena while protecting their project managers and leaving the currency issues to experts in the finance organization.

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.

Today’s topic deals with how time worked (by people/labor resources) is collected and accounted for on projects charged.

Organizations that manage by project, collect labor costs against projects via timecards. These organizations struggle with the rules/validations that need to be applied to this time collection process based on the following competing business requirements:

1. Need for accurate time reporting for
   1. Paying employees what they are due
   2. Collecting true cost of doing work in order to allow for accurate estimating for future work
2. Need for Time Costing for Revenue Accrual and Invoice Generation based on project contracting rules.

Labor Resource Classification
People who charge time to projects in any organization fall into 3 categories:

1. Exempt resources:  these are typically full time employees of the organization who get paid a fixed salary and do not receive any additional compensation for Overtime worked.

2. Hours resources: these can be full time or contract labor that get paid by the hour and are eligible for additional compensation (time and a half or double time) for overtime worked.

3. Contingent or Contract workers who work as employees on projects. From a time accounting perspective these employees fall into one of the above two categories and are not considered separately for the purpose of this discussion.

Time Accounting for Hourly Resources
Hourly resources need to enter all time worked with the appropriate classification (Regular/Overtime) in order to get paid and also to record accurate costs to the project, including additional cost incurred for overtime pay. The need to record all hours for the purposes of accurate payment to the resource also serves an additional purpose of providing accurate expended effort for the purpose of future estimation.This then leaves the question of what is billable to the client. This wholly depends on the nature of the contract. The contract may demand that they be billed for all time at a standard bill rate (thereby reducing the margin to the project for overtime worked and paid) or even that no overtime be billed at all; in which case the project will need to absorb the overtime hours and their related costs.

The piece of time accounting for hourly resources that I have not addressed here are the additional complications introduced with Government and Union Regulations like prevailing wages. This is another topic for another day all together.

Time Accounting for Exempt Resources
It is in the best interest of the project organization to enforce policies that dictate that exempt employees record all time worked to the projects on which the work was performed. This provides two major soft benefits, one of which was discussed above: that of collecting accurate data for improving estimating algorithms for future work. The other benefit that can often be obscured is the visibility provided to management for the people consistently going above and beyond for their projects.Now let’s see the impact of project contracts on accounting for time of exempt resources. Contracts for project work typically come in two flavors:

1. Time and Material: Billings against these types of contracts typically bill for each time item charged to the project. Billings are dependent on using schedules of bill rates for specific people or specific classes of people. Such contracts may further limit the number of hours that are billable on a per day or week basis and hence the billability of time charged will need to be adjusted accordingly.

2. Cost Reimbursement: These contracts typically include terms for billings based on cost multipliers, cost + fixed hourly/daily/weekly fee or even a fixed/variable fee over total project cost which is reimbursed (as incurred) upto a specified cap. The application of multipliers or fees on cost can get complex but is relatively simple compared to trying to figure out how to determine cost of time charged.

The issues arise due to the need to accurately determine the exact cost of time charged and this can get tricky in the case of exempt resources who work for a fixed salary irrespective of the number of hours worked. If exempt resource charge more time than the standard (8 hrs/day or 40 hrs/week) hours, then the daily/weekly cost rate for the resources needs to be spread over all hours worked in order to derive the true cost time worked. This issue is further compounded when the same resources work on multiple projects: in this case cost determination needs to look at all hours charged across projects.

This concept of spreading periodic cost rate for an exempt resource over all time charged by the resource is called effective costing. Some of the challenges in accomplishing effective costing include identifying all time charged by a person for a given period across all projects charged. Another issue deals with late time. If some time for a period is charged late, it may result in the need for recalculating cost for all time charged in order to accommodate the new time charges.

One solution that some organizations use to workaround the challenges of effective costing is to limit the entry of hours to the standard hours only, i.e. 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week. This solves the problem but is not a good solution for all the reasons discussed above.
Standard v/s Actual Costing of Time
One major challenge that needs to be overcome by any organization that wants to operate on a project basis is determining which of the following costing method they would like to use determine cost rates for people resources.
1. Standard Costing: In using this method an average cost rate is derived for all resources in a particular resource classification (Job Category) and then used for all resources in that classification
2. Actual Costing: The actual cost rates for each individual are used for costing time. A variation of this is referred to as Payroll costing, where in the costs from actual payroll runs are distributed over time charged to projects to determine project costs. Payroll Costing has distinct disadvantages in terms of timeliness of cost collection, especially as payroll runs happen infrequently and this can delay reporting costs on the project.

The following table lays out some of the advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches towards time costing.

(Dis)Advantage	Std. Cost	Actual Cost	Comments
1. Accurate Cost Reporting	X	X	Actual costing obviously provides the most accurate view of cost of time. The place where it falls short on is items like variable compensation elements like Bonuses. These items are paid occasionally and it is impossible to spread these costs over time charged in prior periods
2. Labor Cost Security	X		Standard Costing wins on this one as standard costing equates cost for all resources in a category.
3. Ease of Estimating	X		It is easier to estimate accurately with standard costing, especially when the exact resources are not known
4. Cost Variance to Plan	X		When std. costing is used for both planning and actuals, cost variance reflect planning deficiencies and are not based on cost rate variances.
5. Dependency on Payroll		X	Actual Costing may be dependent on Payroll runs in order to reflect the true cost of resources.

These are some of the factors that can be used to decide on which approach to use and as is evident here, standard costing is preferred in most cases. The only time when users have no choice but to use actual costing is in very low margin industries like Engineering and construction where labor cost rates are known (due to prevailing and union rates) and the difference between standard and actual rates can actually wipe out the entire margin that a project may have planned for. Other times where actual costing may be mandated (almost) is when contracting with the government who typically provide you with Cost Reimbursement contracts and often audit your project costs to match your payroll. 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.