The Feature

Check Out New User Interface Applications from Project Partners

May 29, 2009 on 12:26 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Conversations | 2 Comments |  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.

Using Oracle Projects? Check Out Project Information Center

January 24, 2007 on 8:55 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

If you are an Oracle Projects customer, check out a couple of interesting products from Projects Partners branded as Project Information Center. There are some great features for Project Billing and general project reporting, and it makes you wonder why this functionality hasn’t yet become part of the standard Oracle Projects functionality…

Project Information Center (PIC) is an easy-to-use, web-based composite application for project-centric businesses. PIC extends the functionality of Oracle E-Business Suite Applications. As a server-based product with a browser interface, enterprise-wide roll-out of PIC is simple and total cost of ownership is low.

• PIC Invoicing delivers custom invoice formats integrated with Oracle Project Billing, Oracle Receivables and Oracle XML Publisher, to enable you to bill your customers in their preferred form.

• PIC Reporting provides complex reporting that spans multiple projects and operating units, and detailed project and task reporting. More significantly, PIC’s Financial Statement Generator easily creates complex financial reports, like Profit and Loss Statements, at various levels of flexible hierarchies, across heterogeneous systems.

Project Information Center (PIC)â„¢ Invoicing

Project Information Center Invoicing (PIC Invoicing) is a wizard-driven invoice formatting solution for project-centric businesses. This add-on solution is fully integrated with Oracle Project Billing, Oracle Receivables and Oracle XML Publisher, and provides a new approach for creating invoice formats for Oracle Project Billing users. Business Users can use desktop word processing tools to create invoice layout and formats. The PIC wizard provides predefined data sources that retrieve summary and detailed information from the database – users don’t need to understand Oracle Projects, Receivables and HR tables.

Using PIC Invoicing, you can define multiple groups like labor, non-labor and vendor invoices within an invoice with separate grouping and sorting criteria for each group. You can use one or more fields like expenditure category, revenue category, tasks, or user defined elements like flexfields for grouping and sorting each section. Invoice lines can be displayed in a user-defined order, e.g. display all labor, followed by burden amounts applied to labor type only, then non-labor items and their burden amounts, and then common burden amounts. You can override certain fields or add free-format text. This flexibility is balanced by controls to specify which fields can be overridden.

You can consolidate multiple invoices by master project, customer, ACRN or user defined parameter. You can create industry, or customer-specific invoice formats like AIA billing formats for E&C, T&M and fixed price contracts for PSA, government forms such as SF1034, SF1035 and DD250 formats. PIC Invoicing provides pre-built templates for several standard forms. You can also create invoice packages that include a summary form, detailed forms and itemized back-ups such as labor and other direct costs. PIC Invoicing will produce the final invoices for presentation to your customer in PDF, Excel, text and HTML formats, and invoices can be emailed based upon business rules.

Project Information Center (PIC)â„¢ Reporting

Project Information Center Reporting (PIC Reporting) is an easy-to-use, tailorable reporting and information delivery solution for project-centric businesses. PIC Reporting provides complex reporting that spans multiple projects and operating units and detailed project and task reporting. More significantly, PIC’s Financial Statement Generator easily creates complex financial reports, like Profit and Loss Statements, at various levels of flexible hierarchies. PIC seamlessly integrates with Oracle Applications and this high-performance web-based solution is very intuitive to use. With minimal training, users can access all the information necessary to support their business role, including financial, project status, aging, bookings and backlog. These high-resolution reports can be saved in whole or in part, and are presented in XML, PDF, text or Excel format.

A single PIC report can integrate and present information from multiple sources, including packaged applications like Oracle, legacy apps, data warehouses, XML and ODBC data sources, desktop applications and flat files. PIC provides native connectivity to popular databases like Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and Progress, in addition to ODBC/JDBC connectivity. The PIC server also supports access to Enterprise Java Bean, CORBA, COM or C++ objects. PIC has a generic reporting infrastructure based on pl/sql procedures, views, and the PIC metadata model. PIC’s middleware insulates end user reports from underlying data model changes in the Oracle Applications.

For more information about Project Information Center products, refer to the PIC Invoicing Fact Sheet and PIC Reporting Fact Sheet.

Source: Project Partners website.