Projects Financial Plan Upgrade Solution

Flexible Budget Modeling and Robust Forecasting is Essential for Successful Project Financial Management

Release 12.2.5 of Oracle E-Business Suite Project Management allows you to leverage Budgetary Controls with Financial Plans, providing more flexible budget modeling and robust forecasting - which is essential for good project financial management. Upgrade from the old Budget Type model to Financial Plans and greatly improve your project operations.

Why Upgrade?

Financial Plans

Financial plans offer many advantages over the old Budget Type model in Oracle Projects. Oracle Projects’ Financial Plans provide many new features empowering project managers to have more control over their projects. Sophisticated financial planning is enabled by the following.

  • Quantity amounts for rate-based resources can be entered with auto calculation of currency amounts, e.g. enter number of hours for a resource to obtain the dollar value
  • Support for multiple currencies
  • Budgets and Forecasts can be time-phased, allowing for different time phasing of various tasks/resources in the project structure
  • Automatically spread amounts across the entire project and dynamically display them based upon a period profile definition that allows for flexible grouping of periods (PA or GL), for example, displaying amounts from all past periods in one column, displaying current year values per period , and all future amounts quarterly
  • New tasks/resources can be added as project changes may require with new start/end dates and end dates for existing tasks/resources can be modified as needed
  • Implementing Financial Plans leverages PPR which in turn opens the door to further drive visibility into project health by measurement of financial performance against KPIs

Forecasts

Forecasts are vitally important because they provide a current point in time financial status of the project projected at completion. This incorporates Actuals to Date and an Estimate-to-Complete amount for each planning line that incorporates remaining values and enables PMs to incorporate potential variances and changes to provide an accurate Estimate at Complete value. This forecast enables tracking of important project performance information, comparison with budget amounts, as well as the flexibility to modify the budget as the project progresses to reflect real world changes. The significance of this is financial visibility of project health. Project managers, who are the closest to project activity, are given the tools to provide timely information that alerts management to those projects/tasks that are over budget.

In addition to the features noted above relating to all financial plans, Oracle Projects’ Forecast Financial Plans support additional new features specific to forecasting, thereby empowering project managers to have more control over their projects, for example:

  • Forecasts can be automatically generated based on actuals to-date and estimates-to-complete, which can be derived from various sources such as budget or prior forecast amounts, and presented to the project manager as a draft forecast
  • Project managers can enter/adjust estimate-to-complete (ETC) values for any task and/or resource based on their knowledge of the project’s status and upcoming changes

Make it Even Easier with Project Partners User Interface Applications

Project Partners’ UI-Apps take this one step further by enabling all this functionality in a smart, configurable, Microsoft Excel worksheet where no native Oracle HTML navigation is required. All the native Oracle Projects Financial Plan functionality is available for the project manager to easily see the current budget, ETC, and forecast amounts. All the Oracle business rules are supported and if needed, the forecast can be worked in airplane mode, offline while away from a network connection – while travelling or in the field. Later the updates can be uploaded back to Oracle.

All of this translates into better visibility into project health with a lower cost basis of achieving these results. Forecasting is put directly in the hands of the project manager, thereby freeing up project administrators to do other things rather than retyping amounts that project managers may have collected in a spreadsheet since the last forecast cycle. This also results in fewer errors.

Return on Investment

The ROI for this solution is impressive. A medium sized enterprise can easily save the cost of two project administrators, thereby recapturing the cost in one year!

Fixed Price Offering

A nine week engagement that includes budgeting, forecasting, and Project Partners' User Interface Applications (UI-Apps) product. The results include the following:

  • Ability for Project Managers to manage project budgets
  • Ability to generate forecasts and analyze them to determine project health before issues arise
  • Ability to leverage Project Performance Reporting to ensure timely visibility of potential financial issues
  • Ability for PMs to work with Microsoft Excel workbooks to manage budgets, forecasts, and review project financials – using data that is synchronized with Oracle
  • Ability to work offline using Excel workbooks with data populated from Oracle

Download our Fact Sheet to Learn More

Learn more about this solution by registering and downloading our Fact Sheet.

Contact Us

Contact Us to learn how upgrading your Oracle E-Business Suite Projects functionality will improve your project operations and deliver rapid ROI.