Project Partners Blog

Try Us and Find Out How You Can Have It All Right Now!

By Pat Bowyer

On March 28, 2012, we presented an OAUG Sponsored webcast to discuss and demonstrate the timecard entry solutions we’ve developed, our mProjects Time Management™ mobile timecard and our TimeSpeed™ spreadsheet user-interface applications, both fully integrated with Oracle Time and Labor and Oracle Projects, and extending the functionality of those applications, that will help take the headache out of project timecard entry.

Sound interesting? You can register to view the recorded webinar here.
Read the rest of this entry »

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

Oracle Report Manager is an online report distribution system that provides a secure and centralized location to produce and manage point-in-time reports. Report producers submit, publish, and set security for reports. Report consumers view and approve reports. Reports can be published and presented to certain responsibilities without additional security or a variety of security models can be applied, allowing only authorized users to view entire reports or parts of reports. In addition, we can use specific templates to integrate reports displayed by Report Manager using the organization’s individual style. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Oracle Advanced Global Intercompany System (AGIS) is a powerful application designed to handle the complex Intercompany accounting and processing requirements of global corporations. It has been designed and built using the OA Framework that is easy to use, and yet very sophisticated and rich in feature sets. It leverages the core building blocks of R 12 architecture in the areas of Legal Entity, Trading Community Architecture, Sub Ledger Accounting for Transaction Account Definition, workflow integration for processing and Approvals Management Application(AME) for transaction approval. The greatest benefit of the application is its ease of use for multiple companies belonging to different legal entities and Primary Ledger(s) across the globe that shares the same Oracle Application instance. 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 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

Project Managers’ Needs

Project Managers need tools to quickly and easily plan and execute project work.  They typically are used to working with Microsoft® Excel as their primary tool for maintaining every type of project data from WBS and Schedules to budgets, status reports, forecasts, issues and change orders. They even want to see all their reporting data in spreadsheets which in turn allow them to perform any type of analysis they need.  Furthermore, and especially in Professional Services organizations, they need access to project data “on the go” in a disconnected mode as the project managers are frequently travelling to client sites.

Oracle Project Management was one of the first generic project management software applications that was released pre-integrated with the back-office project accounting functions along with other ERP applications. It provides a comprehensive workbench for project managers allowing them to manage all their project information from one place. Being a generic off-the-shelf application, it, however, is burdened with complexity delivered via an HTML-based user interface that requires a significant investment in training to get the project managers comfortable with it. Most organizations cannot afford this investment in time from their project managers as they are already busy with ongoing projects. Furthermore, the HTML-based user interface, by necessity, requires a connection to the office intranet in order to access project data.

Enabling Project Managers

The Project Partners User Interface Applications (UI-Apps) are built to work seamlessly with Oracle Project Management and provide project managers with a simple MS-Excel based user interface with built-in industry specific processes for Engineering and Construction and Professional Services organizations.  The UI-Apps user interface allows for quick and easy retrieval of project information, the ability to update data either while connected to Oracle, or offline, and then a one click upload to Oracle to provide automatic updates back into Oracle Project Management.  Project managers generally would log into Oracle from MS-Excel whenever they’re connected to the office intranet, and download their project information to the UI-Apps worksheets.  They then save their worksheets to their local machines.

Project Managers can now go on the road and review and update information into the UI-Apps worksheets at anytime and, whenever they next connect to the office intranet, they can simply upload the updates back to Oracle. 

UI-Apps Functions

The initial release of UI-Apps covers the following PM functions:

* Build and Maintain Project WBS

   – Create, indent and outdent tasks

* Build and Maintain Project Schedules

   – Update task financial and schedule attributes

* Build and Maintain Project Budgets

   – Select and assign resources (based on resource format) from planning resource list

   – Automatically determine planned resource costs and revenue using cost, burden and bill rates from Oracle Projects

   – Plan in Project or Project Functional Currencies. UI-Apps automatically converts all rates downloaded to the Worksheets into the selected currency

   – Select a spread curve and automatically spread resource costs across PA/GL periods. Update individual periodic amounts and automatically maintain total planned amounts.

   – Save working and submit for approval (Baseline for Financial Plans and Publishing for Workplans)

* Capture Project Schedule Progress

   – Update Progress – Physical Percent Complete, Estimates to Complete, Task Progress status

* Update Project Financial Forecasts and Schedule Attributes

   – Update WBS – New tasks, task dates, other financial and schedule attributes

   – Review and Update Forecast – Review actual-to-date and maintain ETC/EAC amounts

   – Save Working – progress, Workplan Updates and Forecasts

   – Submit for Approval – Progress, Workplan changes and Forecasts.

* Review Project Costs

   – Review Cost summary by WBS and Cost Categories

This is accomplished via five MS-Excel worksheets that are delivered for handling time-phased and lump-sum plans, one sheet each for budgets and forecasts. One additional sheet is provided for reporting project costs by WBS and implementation defined cost groupings. 

Above and beyond the core functionality shown above, each of the sheets is also highly configurable.  A large selection of fields and table columns can be displayed or hidden based upon requirements.  Custom fields can also be displayed/updated providing the ability to save and retrieve customer-specific data back into Oracle Projects via Oracle-supported DFFs and/or UDAs.  Additionally, each worksheet can be configured with custom colors, fonts, prompt and column heading names and row/column sizes.

Deploying UI-Apps

The UI-Apps are delivered with pre-built configuration capabilities that allow the implementation team to quickly setup the worksheets to meet their business process and the worksheets adapt to the planning configurations from Oracle automatically. The look and feel of the worksheets can be rapidly adjusted to user requirements using built-in table configurations and standard MS-Excel formatting capabilities and various delivered extension points allow the implementation team to add data elements and custom business validations to the worksheets using easily available PL/SQL skills.

These various configuration options enable a rapid implementation cycle for the UI-Apps – 4-6 weeks after receiving the software.

All in all, UI-Apps enables project managers via built-in industry specific MS-Excel worksheets giving them a familiar user interface and enabling allowing them to manage better and deliver better profits.