Overview of Oracle Projects

This chapter provides a brief overview of the Oracle Projects group of applications, including
Oracle Project Costing, Oracle Project Billing, Oracle Project Resource Management, Oracle
Project Management, Oracle Project Collaboration, Oracle Daily Business Intelligence for
Projects, and Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis.

This chapter covers the following topics:

Overview of Oracle Projects

The applications that make up the Oracle Projects suite work together to provide a complete
enterprise project management solution. They give you a flexible approach to defining and
managing your projects and the people, schedules, deliverables, and finances associated with
them.

At the aggregate level, enterprise project management involves the collection and coordination of
corporate resources (such as people, money, and hard assets) to accomplish a predefined scope
of work in a scheduled time frame and budget. Some enterprises only have projects that are
internal in nature, such as projects that track time and costs related to marketing campaigns or
infrastructure build-out programs for capital development. Alternatively, many enterprises are
entirely project oriented: they derive their entire income stream from projects that provide client
services. Oracle Projects includes billing functionality that enables these enterprises to generate
project invoices of varying complexity for their clients.

The Oracle Projects application suite includes a variety of features central to the requirements of
competent and efficient enterprise project management. It enables project managers to
effectively oversee their projects, assess progress against predetermined milestones and
budgets, staff their projects with appropriate talent, and quickly generate a wide variety of
reports. It also helps virtual and globally distributed project teams to efficiently communicate,
collaborate, and complete tasks.

Oracle Projects also gives corporate executives the ability to quickly see how projects are
performing across the enterprise. It enables them to drill down to areas of geographical interest
or product specialization to review projects that are potential problems or are in immediate need
of additional attention.

Oracle Projects applications are designed to integrate with many other Oracle application suites
(including Oracle HRMS, Oracle Financials, and Oracle Supply Chain applications) to provide an
efficient information flow, facilitate a global sharing of resources, and provide robust
intercompany accounting.

Oracle Projects consists of the following products:

 Oracle Project Costing

 Oracle Project Billing
 Oracle Project Resource Management
 Oracle Project Management
 Oracle Project Collaboration
 Oracle Daily Business Intelligence for Projects
 Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis
The following sections provide detail information on each of these products.

Oracle Project Costing

Oracle Project Costing provides an integrated cost management solution for all projects and
activities within an enterprise. With Project Costing you can manage costs across currency and
organizational boundaries. Project Costing also acts as a central repository of project plans and
transactions, processes project costs, and creates corresponding accounting entries to satisfy
corporate finance requirements.

Project Costing gives operations managers and finance managers complete and timely access to
project performance information and the resulting accounting impacts thereof. It also empowers
line managers with timely, detailed cost information to monitor project performance in a
productivity-enhancing format, and enables financial managers to track the total cost of running
the business.

The key features of Oracle Project Costing are:

 Versatile template-driven project definition

 Multiple currency financial plan and budget creation
 Diverse accrual and expenditure capture
 Robust expenditure control, collection, and adjustment functionality, integrated with other Oracle
applications
 Powerful burdening functionality
 Rule-based general ledger account functionality
 Comprehensive reporting functionality with drilldown capability
 Capable asset creation and CIP cost collection

Oracle Project Costing can be extended with Oracle Project Billing (see below) and is part of the
Oracle Enterprise Project Management Suite, an integrated suite of internet applications
designed to transform businesses to e-businesses.

For more information about Oracle Project Costing, see the Oracle Project Costing User Guide.

Oracle Project Billing

Oracle Project Billing enables enterprises to simplify customer invoicing, streamline corporate
cash flow, and measure the profitability of contract projects. Using configurable accounting rules,
Oracle Project Billing extends Oracle Project Costing functionality by processing actual costs,
creating corresponding accounting entries for revenue accrual to satisfy corporate finance
requirements, and creating customer invoices for project work. With Project Billing, project
managers can review project invoices online and analyze project profitability, and accounting
managers can see the corporate impact of project work.

The key features of Oracle Project Billing are:

 Robust contract project creation functionality, enabling distinction between project types, revenue
accrual and invoice methods, billing cycles, and contacts
 Flexible agreements in multiple currencies with either hard or soft limits
 Budgeting for revenue in multiple currencies, separately from cost
 Organization-level and project-specific billing rate schedules and overrides
 Versatile billing retention and tax functionality
 Flexible revenue accrual calculation
 Optional capability to create invoices using invoice methods differently from the way revenue is
accrued
 Optional capability, using Date-Effective Funds Consumption, to have revenue and invoice
generation use the same logic to determine what funding to consume
 Optional capability to apply receipts to an agreement as advance amounts, and reduce the balance
on the advance when expenditure or event transactions are invoiced
 Several powerful invoice management features, including holds, currency selection, and
review/approve/release functionality
 Robust adjustment functionality, including billable status change, selective recalculation and
write-off management
 Reports for unbilled receivables and unearned revenue
 Integration between Oracle Project Billing and other Oracle applications