Project Partners Blog

By Ravi Shankar, PgMP

This is Part 2 of a 2 part blog series on Program Reporting in Oracle E-Business Suite Project Management (PJT).  These  blog articles and our May 4th Webinar will help you understand how to use Program Reporting in your organization.

Program Roll-up Metrics

The following metrics roll up at the Program level:

• Financial Performance (Budgets, Forecast, Actuals for Cost, Revenue, Margin, etc)
• Effort
• Cost
• Revenue
• Earned Value
• Billability
• Billing and Collection
• Backlog

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By Ravi Shankar, PgMP

The Oracle E-Business Suite Project Management (PJT) application offers a key feature that is not yet widely used, but delivers valuable functionality: Program Reporting.  This 2 part blog article and our May 4th Webinar will help you understand how to use Program Reporting in your organization.

Program Level reporting, as distinct from managing the Program itself, is the process wherein related Projects are linked to the Program Project. While the Program itself is a Project, and hence could have its own activities for costs, budgets revenue, etc, it could also be the recipient of rolled up data of related Child Projects, whose financial, Workplan and Progress information are visible in the Performance Management Tab of the Program.

For the Program level roll up reporting, we link the individual child projects to the lowest WBS of the program project. A linked child Project could by itself be also a Program i.e. could have roll up of Projects to itself. Read the rest of this entry »

By Kimberly McDonald Baker

Project Partners is pleased to announce that we will be presenting six papers at the Collaborate 11 conference in Orlando, Florida in April.  While at the conference, be sure to visit us in Booth 953 in the Exhibit Hall, and enter to win a Kindle. Read the rest of this entry »

By Kimberly McDonald Baker

Project Partners is pleased to announce that our OP3 product, which provides bi-directional integration between the Oracle E-Business Suite Projects Applications and Oracle Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management applications, is now certified to work on all supported releases of these Oracle applications.

OP3 is the only bi-directional integration product currently warranted to work with all releases of Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management and Oracle E-Business Suite Projects (Oracle Projects) Release 11.5.10.M through Release 12.1.3. OP3 integrates project structures and plans, budgets, actual costs and committed costs. Read the rest of this entry »

By Kimberly McDonald Baker

Project Partners worked with Iberdrola Renewables to implement their Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management system – which resulted in awards for both Iberdrola Renewables and Project Partners. 

Iberdrola Renewables is a very exciting company in the fast growing renewable energy field.  Its portfolio of power assets require 24-hour energy management and scheduling, every day of the year.

The firm identified several key challenges they wanted their new Enterprise Project Portfolio Mangement system to address. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Projects Applications Release 12 provides rich functionality to support multi currency processing capabilities in the areas of accruing revenue and generating invoices.  Revenue is always processed in the project functional currency, as distinct from the project currency and project funding currency.  Revenue amounts derived in the billing transaction currency (invoice processing currency) are converted to project functional, funding and project currency during the revenue generation process.  The Release 12 EBS system tracks and posts the revenue, unbilled receivables and unearned revenue in both the functional and billing transaction currency to the general ledger, thereby giving full visibility, both at the project level and in the general ledger, of the details of revenue in the different currency options. Read the rest of this entry »

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

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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 »

By Tamim Kulaly, PMP

The first important question is “why do projects fail?” There could be several reasons:

• Project over run –  The project takes longer than planned
• Cost over run – Executing the project cost more than budgeted
• Underperformance  – The project team did not deliver the goals of the project
• Plan too optimistic – Evidencing a lack of understanding of true scope of the project
• Scope creep – The scope of the project increased but plans and budgets were not revised accordingly
• Other – Sometimes things go wrong due to lack of appropriate resources or equipment failure or bad weather or other unpleasant surprises.

To avoid the downfalls of project failures, project centric organizations should look into Risk Analysis products to minimize project risks. Oracle’s Primavera Risk Analysis is a full lifecycle risk analytics solution integrating cost and schedule risk management. Users will have an objective view of required contingency to account for cost and schedule uncertainty as well as analyzing the cost effectiveness of risk response plans. 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 »