The Feature

Check Out New User Interface Applications from Project Partners

May 29, 2009 on 12:26 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Conversations | |  Print |  Email

Some time ago, I interviewed Randy Egger on this blog about his involvement in establishing the Oracle Projects suite and his current activities as president of Project Partners. We picked it up where we left off last time and talked about their current activities, specifically their release of the User Interface Applications.

Marian Crkon: What are Project Partners User Interface Applications?

Randy Egger: Project Partners User Interface Applications (UI-Apps) are a series of user friendly Microsoft Excel based applications that interact with the Oracle E-Business Suite Project Costing, Project Billing and Project Management applications.  The UI-Apps consist of pre-defined, role based workbooks which are designed to specifically address the needs of users in the Professional Services and Engineering & Construction Industries, and also are easily configurable as a solution for Capital Projects budgeting in any industry.

How is it different from the standard Oracle Applications interface and why is it needed?

The technical difference is that the client software that the user interacts with to connect to the standard Oracle Application is Microsoft Excel, not html pages in a browser. There are three functional differences of this approach.

First, users have an already familiar tool in which they’re performing their work – spreadsheets. Second, users have the ability to configure the Excel worksheets to meet their own business processes – that’s not such an easy thing to do in Oracle Applications. Third – and this is something that especially resonates with users - they have the ability to work in an off-line mode.

They can make updates wherever they are with their laptops, and save their work, and then later reconnect to Oracle and upload their data. Think about it from the perspective of the end users: there’s electricity just about everywhere they go, but there’s not always an available internet connection.

Which Oracle forms can be replaced by the Project Partners User Interface workbooks?

This is not a one for one switch – instead, think of it as a refreshing new paradigm.  Project Partners has developed a proprietary technology to enable bidirectional communication via XML from Excel to the standard Oracle Applications Server, to the Oracle Applications database.

The Project Partners standard, out-of-the-box product just announced this month delivers Excel worksheets which are oriented to project managers who need to maintain WBS tasks/resources, budgets, and enter Estimate to Complete and progress data to create forecasts.  And any one of these activities could take up 20 different forms or html pages in Oracle.

The key here is that we are completely looking at this from the perspective of the end-user.  End users (project managers in this case) look at these activities from the perspective of needing to create forecasts for their projects.  They don’t look at it from the perspective of “which forms do I need to go to?”  Our UI-Apps approach is as revolutionary and radically different from the traditional ERP approach as the Mac was to the PC when it was first introduced in the 1980s.

This is demonstrated by the fact that UI-Apps is highly configurable by our customers’ IT staff (with no special skills at all) to present an end user experience that is a complete solution with only the data fields, terminology, colors, lay-out, and flow that they are already familiar with in their organization’s daily operations.  However, the double-benefit of this is that it’s all delivered to them in a package that they are familiar and comfortable with: spreadsheets.

Which project management processes and tasks can be accomplished in the UI-Apps workbooks?

Project Partners’ UI-Apps offer pre-defined Oracle-integrated workbooks oriented to users who need to create tasks and budgets, and also to those who perform forecasting.  These workbooks are designed to specifically address the needs of users in the Professional Services and Engineering & Construction Industries, and also are easily configurable as a solution for Capital Projects budgeting in any industry.

Which versions of Oracle Applications are supported?

Oracle E-Business Suite Project Management, Project Costing, and Project Billing, R11.5.10Rup3 – through R12.1

How does UI-Apps interface with MS Project or Primavera?

UI-Apps integrates directly with Oracle Projects, and therefore indirectly interfaces with these products.  We are also considering a similar application for Primavera products.

How does this differ from other vendors with Excel based solutions?

Some vendors provide data loading capabilities used by administrative folks, for example, back office users, to collect data for the end users and use their tools to load data and map into Oracle.  Other vendors provide tools to extract data from Oracle for reporting only.  UI-Apps provides a comprehensive user interface for the end user (mainly a project manager) bundled with built-in best practices and data validation, allowing for disconnected and connected, two-way data access to Projects data – pull and push.   It’s not just a data loader, and not just a reporter – it’s both. Two mints in one!  Like I said, it’s a very refreshing paradigm.

You can find more information about UI Applications and other products here.