The Feature

Nobody Knows Oracle Projects, Right?

February 25, 2006 on 5:00 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Reviews | |  Print |  Email

Not true. But it definitely feels that way when you implement Projects for companies, which are not typical project-centric businesses. There are (I am told) many companies in industries like construction, professional services, telecom, product development and others, as well as government agencies, who choose Oracle Applications instead of Peoplesoft or SAP specifically because of its Projects application. I had an opportunity to work with several clients who not only got Projects, but took advantage of every single bell and whistle available to them. So what is Oracle Projects? Currently it is marketed as Oracle Projects suite, which includes following products:

• Project Costing
• Project Billing
• Project Resource Management
• Project Management
• Project Contracts

Having listed all of them, I still believe that the original application name Project Accounting best describes what Projects is all about - it collects or calculates your project costs and revenues, translates them to your chart of accounts, and automatically posts journal entries to your General Ledger. Project Costing and Project Billing make up a true core of the suite.

Project Resource Management, Project Management, and Project Contracts are not as much applications (even though they are being sold under separate licenses), as they are “layers” of additional functions you can turn on and off. These three products cannot be installed or used as stand alone applications without Project Costing and/or Project Billing implemented first. There are also several auxiliary applications including Time and Labor, Project Collaboration, Daily Business Intelligence for Projects, and Project Portfolio Analysis, which make up the whole suite.

Oracle Projects gained several major enhancements in release 11i, including better costing, burdening, cost allocations, billing, as well as usability improvements.

Oracle Projects Integration with Other Applications

Oracle General Ledger Integration

Oracle Projects fully integrates with Oracle General Ledger so you can update your GL balances with Oracle Projects activity. When you transfer cost and revenue information to Oracle General Ledger, you use Oracle Projects to collect all project cost and revenue detail transactions, summarize them, and transfer them to Oracle General Ledger.

Oracle Human Resources Integration

Oracle Projects shares organization, job, and employee information with Oracle Human Resources. If your business does not use Oracle Human Resources, you can easily enter this data in Oracle Projects. Oracle Human Resources integration includes:

• Business Group definition
• Organizations and Organization Hierarchies definitions
• Job Title definitions
• Entry of Employees and Employee Assignments, including date-effective assignments over time and specification of supervisors and billing titles

Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Payables Integration

Oracle Projects fully integrates with Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Payables, and allows you to enter project-related requisitions, purchase orders, and supplier invoices using those applications. When you enter project-related information in Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Payables, the system carries the project information from the requisition to the purchase order in Oracle Purchasing, to the supplier invoice in Oracle Payables, and to the project expenditure in Oracle Projects. You can report committed costs of requisitions and purchase orders that are outstanding against your projects in Oracle Projects.

Oracle Internet Expenses Integration

Oracle Projects fully integrates with Oracle Internet Expenses and Oracle Payables so that you can easily create project expense reports in iExpenses, and pay them in Oracle Payables. You can also enter expense reports in Oracle Projects and use Oracle Payables to create invoices from the expense reports, maintain and track payments of them, and transfer the accounting transactions to Oracle General Ledger.

Oracle Receivables Integration

Oracle Projects fully integrates with Oracle Receivables to process your invoices and track customer payments. Oracle Projects generates draft invoices and uses Oracle Receivables to collect payments for the project invoices and transfer the accounting transactions to Oracle General Ledger. When you transfer invoices to Oracle Receivables, Oracle Projects also maintains project balances of unbilled receivables and unearned revenue and creates accounting transactions for these amounts.

Oracle Assets Integration

Oracle Projects allows you to manage capital projects. In a capital project, you collect construction-in-process (CIP) and expensed costs for each asset you are building. You use Oracle Projects to collect all asset cost detail transactions, summarize them, and transfer them to Oracle Assets to become depreciable fixed assets. Oracle Assets will create and transfer journal entries to Oracle General Ledger to relieve the CIP account and record the asset cost.

External Systems Integration

You can upload transactions from external cost collection systems into Oracle Projects using the Transaction Import interface and Oracle WebADI upload tool. You can load quantities or quantities and raw costs for the transactions. Oracle Projects calculates burdened cost, revenue, and invoice amounts, and performs all accounting functions for these imported transactions.

For more information about implementing Oracle Projects, refer to:

• Oracle Projects Implementation Guide 11i
• Oracle Projects Fundamentals User Guide 11i

For more information about Oracle Project Costing, see Project Costing - Know What It Takes to Run Your Projects, or refer to other Oracle resources:

• Oracle Project Costing Data Sheet with an overview and summary of key features.
• Oracle Project Costing 11i User Guide

For more information about Oracle Project Billing, see Project Billing - Show Me the Money (coming up shortly), or refer to other Oracle resources:

• Oracle Project Billing Data Sheet with an overview and summary of key features.
• Oracle Project Billing User Guide 11i

21 Comments »

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1. I went through the article and found it very informative.can a utility company dealing in different kind of projects of transmission,distribution,civil works can go for this type of solution or not.

   Comment by Umer — June 7, 2007 #

2. Yes! I have seen and worked with several utility companies who used Oracle Projects and Oracle Financials. The Projects application specifically can be used for project costing on your capital and corporate projects and completion of your CIP assets. Add Oracle Time and Labor, iExpenses, Project Management and Resource management and you have a nice end-to-end solution (and your hands full)…

   Comment by Marian — June 7, 2007 #

3. i am working on project costing for the first time, and a little bit lost, if someone can help with documentation or anything
   thank you

   Comment by dimazro — January 1, 2008 #

4. Dimazro, That is quite a broad request. First stop I would recommend is taking the Projects Fundamentals and Project Costing classes. In interim, there is some high-level information at the Oracle Applications page, user guides at Oracle Documentation page, and many other resources at Oracle Metalink…

   Comment by Marian — January 7, 2008 #

5. Hello Marian,

   Your article provides a good summary of what to expect of Oracle Projects in erp environment.

   One area I would like to see comment is “Budgeting”.

   1.Is it part and parcel of Oracle Projects?

   2.Whether there is any differenciation made betweeen “Estimates - at high level” and “Budgets at granular level”?

   3.For intelligent data analysis which serves better DBI or Discoverer?

   Thanks, ViveK

   Comment by Vivek — January 19, 2008 #

6. [...] Oracle Projects Review by It’s a Feature! [...]

   Pingback by The Feature » Oracle Project Costing - Know What It Takes to Run Your Projects — February 1, 2008 #

7. Vivek,

   Budgeting for Projects is part of Oracle Projects. There are different features available depending on the release version you are on and the functionality you decide to implement. For example, there is a limited form of budgetary integration with the GL if you use the “old” budget mechanisms. However, you won’t have standard functionality to upload/download project budgets to Excel. To get this, you need to use the more recent budgeting mechanism - “financial plans”. In terms of format and levels of granularity, this is identical to the old budget mechanism in its earliest versions and sigificantly more flexible in releases such as R11.5.10 with PF.M, or R12. These mechanisms are mutually exclusive at project level. If your operation plans to use Project Resource Management (possibly with MS Projects planning) in the latest releases then using Financial Plans becomes far more appealing. Cost and revenue budgets could be automatically generated based on an approved resource plan derived from your MS project plan, i.e. you plan your resourcing in the planning tool and Oracle will use the rate schedules and formats you specify to produce financial budgets.

   Regarding estimates and granularity, the distinction is typically maintained by defining budgets/forecasts for different purposes, i.e. you maintain them separately. You can have as many different budgets as you like (each with it’s own version history).

   DBI and Discoverer also vary greatly depending on the version you’re using. You need to be aware that generic Discoverer versions aren’t necessarily certified to work with Oracle Applications (it usually appears at some point though…). You need to look into the features available, and think about what it is you’re trying to get to. Discoverer depends on a “map” of the Apps tables referred to as the End User Layer (EUL). Your analysis will only be as good as this map. DBI will include one and it will cover the major tables and views. It will be tailored to support the standard DBI reports. You may find you need to extend it to generate the specific content you’re after. DBI provides KPIs unlike Discoverer (the performance section of Oracle Project Management provides a small subset of these).

   Sorry if this seems a long-winded way of not answering your questions but unfortunately it really does come down to the good ‘ol “It depends”.

   Comment by Steve — February 25, 2008 #

8. Hello,

   Its all very good to read about oracle projects features. But someone knows the list of clients who are using Project management effectively for construction companies ( Leave aside back end operations like Costing and Billing ).
   It will be great if someone can point me to such a list

   Comment by Prasanna kelkar — March 9, 2008 #

9. Does Oracle Projects have a field/attribute for dependencies? Does Oracle Projects have a field/attribute for constraints (start no sooner than, finish no later than)?

   Comment by Rich Legge — November 21, 2008 #

10. Rich,
    I believe in Project Management you can set your expected start date and completion date, as well as actual start date and completion date. What are you trying to do? Thanks for stopping by!
    Marian

    Comment by Marian — November 21, 2008 #

11. I was able to get ahold of the Oracle Project Management User Guide and was able to answer my question.

    I am evaluationg the features and functions. A consultant that was giving us a demo didn’t think dependencies, constraints and other scheduling tasks could be done in Oracle.

    User Manual said that it can be done in Oracle.

    Oracle Projects has an interface to MsProject and I know many customers/implementations use this interface and thus many consultants aren’t familiar with the “scheduling” features of Oracle Project.

    The answer to both questions is “Yes”.

    Comment by Rich Legge — November 21, 2008 #

12. Hi Marian,

    Is there an Oracle R12 Projects Functional Upgrade Guide? If there is, could you let me know which website to go to? Because I’ve searched Metalink and they have the Oracle R12 Financial Upgrade Guide but the guide didn’t discuss anything about Oracle Projects.

    Comment by Jennifer — November 27, 2008 #

13. Hi Jennifer,

    With upgrades, there are two kinds of documents - upgrade user guide, which lists ALL (mostly for DBA) upgrade steps and you have to read through to figure out which functional Projects steps are applicable to you. Or, find the Release 12 Content Document for Projects, which should talk specifically about the new functionality. There are references on this when you search for R12. Try this link:
    http://itsafeature.com/oracle-published-release-content-documents-for-ebusiness-suite-release-12/
    Thanks for stopping by!
    Marian

    Comment by Marian — November 30, 2008 #

14. Marian,
    I read the article and found very informative. As far as carrier option is concerned, Does it have enough scope in the market compared to other modules of Oracle?

    Comment by Amit — February 16, 2009 #

15. I HAVE ERROR IN PROJECT COSTING.When recording expenditures on a certain project I have to select the expenditure type that will be charged on that project and record the expenditure amount on an expenditure batch, then run the distribute cost process that will create the debit account with the amount recorded on the batch. The problem is that we have to run the distribute cost process twice so that the exp batch is cost distributed and the debit account is created. The first time it runs it is completed but with exception and when running the 2nd time it completes successfully. the system is unable to feel the new combination from the 1st time.

    Comment by MOHAMED — February 19, 2009 #

16. Marian

    It was wonderful materail for PA. Thanks

    Comment by P. Amit — March 4, 2009 #

17. Hi Marian,

    We have our Internal Implementation scheduled for Project Accounting. We have already implemented Oracle Financials and Oracle Time and Labour. We are a consulting firm.

    Our current HRMS system is defined with Jobs and Grade. Eg: Consultant with grades B1 – B5 where 1 being the lower. If we want to budget a project with five resources say 1 (B5), 3 (B3) and 1 (B1).

    I believe the provision in our system allows us to map with only Job, this would force us to create grade wise jobs Consultant – B1 , Consultant – B2 and so on. We do not intend to the change the existing HRMS implementation. Kindly let me know if there is way to map our Grade instead of mapping the job.

    I would also like to default the cost associated to the resource when I select the resource.

    I look forward for your favourable reply on the same. Thanks.

    Regards,
    Ganesh CP

    Comment by Ganesh — April 10, 2009 #

18. Hi Ganesh,

    You can define a set of PA jobs separate from the HR jobs map them together. The in Projects, you budget and cost your labor costs by the PA jobs.

    Marian

    Comment by Marian — April 14, 2009 #

19. These three products cannot be installed or used as stand alone applications without Project Costing and/or Project Billing implemented first.

    This is an incorrect statement. Project Resource Management and Project Management can work without having to implement Project Billing and Costing and I have personally been involved in such implementations.

    Comment by Vijay — June 19, 2009 #

20. Well let me rephrase. They cannot work without Project Foundation. But using Resource Management and Project Management without Project Costing and Project Billing is like using a bicycle without wheels…

    Comment by Marian — June 19, 2009 #

21. Hi Marian,

    We are implementing R12 Oracle projects costing & billing for a Contruction & Contracting Co.

    Here we are in the process of building the custom interface between Oracle Projects & Estimation tool.But from the Estimation there around 10000 BOQ items.The client billing is done for this 10000 items.Anyway work Quantity measurements happens at these BoQ Item level for the client billing and the Service POs also are broken down to BoQ item levels.

    Is there any workaround available to track the actuals at rolled up level( say @ 200 to 300 BOQ item) and bill @ 10000 item level.

    Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks in Advance

    Comment by Ramesh — June 29, 2009 #

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