The Feature

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.