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Hello World !

I am back to blogging and this time I will be posting a lot more about my real world experiences as a solution architect implementing various Oracle Fusion ERP and Cx cloud solutions ! Stay tuned and keep supporting me as you did before :)

Oracle Project Resource Management

Oracle Project Resource Management enables enterprises to:

• Leverage Single Global Resource Pool
• Deploy Resources Collaboratively
• Monitor Resource Utilization
• Streamline Organization Forecasting
• Analyze Resource Demand and Supply

Major Features:

• Oracle Project Resource Management enables companies to manage human resource deployment and capacity for project work.
• Built using Oracle’s proven self-service model, Oracle Project Resource Management empowers key project stakeholders, such as project managers, resource managers, and staffing managers, to make optimal use of their single most critical asset: their people.
• With this application, you can manage project resource needs, profitability and organization utilization by searching for, and locating and deploying most qualified people to your projects across your enterprise.
• As a result, you can improve customer and employee satisfaction, maximize resource utilization and profitability, and increase your competitive advantage.
• Oracle Project Resource Management is part of the E-Business Suite, an integrated set of applications engineered to work together.

Key Considerations while implementing Project Resource Management:

• PJR should be used in very process centric organizations. Value out of the application is made out only when processes are followed and data is properly maintained. Resource search of candidates relies on 3 parameters- Resource availability, Skills Set and Job levels.
• Segregation of resources eligible for Staffing - Project Resource Management maintains central resource pool that maintains data about resources availability, skill set, resume, address, job, email, work information, location etc. All the resources in an HR organization need not to be defined in resource pool. This refines the resource search and improve performance of the application.
• Integration between Project Resource Management and Project Management - Out of box functionality in Projects module allows integration between Project resource management and Project Management. Integration can be achieved either by Bottom-up approach as well as Top-down approach.
• Integration between Oracle Time and Labor and Project Resource Management - Objectives of the Project resource Management and Oracle time and labor totally different as one captures resource planning and other calculates actual. There is no out of box functionality available which integrates these two modules.
• Non project centric and small organization - Project Resource Management is not that beneficial for small organizations where there are few projects, non skills based organizations, not much movement of resources across projects or where there are few resources. It is generally used for mid-sized and large-sized organizations.

Creating Parties, Customer Accounts and Sites and creating party relationships

Creating Parties, Customer Accounts and Sites and creating party relationships:

The customer data is an important master data for all enterprises. The Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) creates a central repository for the entire E-Business Suite to store information relating to all members of a trading community (including customers) versus separate tables for each member. The TCA model helps enterprises to record complex business relationships between Trading Community entities (including 3rd party relationships) and it supports all business models, industries, and geographies.

Yum Brands is the parent company for Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. This post explains how your company can think of modeling these three companies in your customer master based on industry best practices.

If your company has ‘Business Relationship’ with all three companies, they will need to be individually created as separate parties.

If your company has ‘Selling Relationship’ with all three companies, they will also need to be individually created as separate accounts.

The below screen shots explains how the three companies can be defined as three separate parties with individual customer accounts and sites. All of the invoices for all the three companies will be sent to Yum Brands headquarters in Delray Beach, FL. But the services are performed at 3 separate locations which are modeled below:

Once the parties, customer accounts and sites are created, we are now ready to assign relationships to the three parties. For this we navigate to ‘Relationship Manager’ and setup YUM BRANDS as a Parent of PIZZA HUT and TACO BELL as below:

Deep dive into Oracle Project Management (PJT) Features and Functionalities

Oracle Project Management (PJT) Key Features:

• Workplan and Progress Management
• Reciprocal integration with MS Projects
• Oracle Resource Management Integration
• Enhanced Budgeting and Forecasting features
• Projects Deliverables Management
• Project Status Reporting
• Issue and Change Management
• Document Management
• Project Performance Reporting
• Performance Exceptions Reporting
• Performance Measures and Graphs
• Program Management and Reporting

 

Workplan and Progress Management features:

• Facilitate scheduled completion of project work
• Task managers and team members can manage their tasks and communicate progress to the PM
• Supports the following key activities:

            • Create, manage, version, and view workplans
            • Create and maintain tasks and resource assignments
            • Track progress for projects, tasks, and resource assignments

 

Reciprocal integration with MS Projects:

• Use MS Projects to create and maintain WBS
• Send and receive a project
• Send an update
• View real-time project information
• Receive real-time values for task attributes
   

Oracle Resource Management Integration:

• Define Project resource requirements based on Project Roles
• Leverage competency for suitable searches with correct skill sets
• Determine project requirement staffing through search and nomination
• Automate employee assignment to the project
• Track time and report against the approved assignment
• Use pre defined (Discoverer) reporting workbooks for reporting

Enhanced Budgeting and Forecasting Features:

• Create budgets and forecasts to manage the financial performance
• Track project status and performance
• Generate budgets and forecasts from:

            • Staffing plans,
            • Workplans,
            • Financial plans

• Enter plan amounts using Microsoft Excel and HTML

 

Projects Deliverables Management Features:

• Create project deliverables, associate them with workplan tasks, and track them
• Define Deliverables
• Define Deliverables Actions
• Execute Deliverables Actions
• Collect & Rollup Deliverables Progress
• Integrate with Other Applications (e.g. AR for Billing)

 

Project Status Reporting Features:

• Report relevant project status information
• Control access to unpublished reports
• Reporting cycles define the start and end dates for the reporting period

 

Issue and Change Management Features:

• Centralized system to manage issues and change requests
• Team members can work together collaboratively
• Track issues and change requests from creation through to completion
• Create issues based on predefined issue types
• Assign actions to people to help resolve the issues
• Enable team members to comment on issues
• Export a list of issues into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for further analysis
• Automatically route issue approval using Oracle Workflow

 

Document Management Features:

• Team Members can attach and store documents
• Attachments can be:

            • a File
            • a URL
            • a Plain text box

• Users can define attachment categories that defines the types of documents that can be attached
• Attachment categories can be based on common characteristics that a class of documents have

 

Performance Reporting Features:

• “At-a-glance” comparison of actual versus planned performance as defined in project budgets and forecasts
• View performance in the areas of effort, cost, profitability, earned value, billing and collections, or capital costs
• Graphical and tabular overview of data
• Review of project performance information at the project, task, and resource levels by time period
• Drill down features to view detailed transaction information such as commitments, expenses, and events

 

Performance Exception Reporting:

• Review a summary of exceptions and issues on a project
• The status indicators provide an immediate understanding of critical, at risk, and on track issues on the project
• Drill down to the details of a single exception, and enter or review remarks and reminders for corrective actions
• Automatically generate the latest exceptions and key performance area status indicators on a periodic basis
• Automatically communicate the latest key performance area performance statuses and exceptions to key stakeholders via e-mail

 

Performance Measurement and Graphs:

• Supports predefined measures for cost and profitability
• Measures appear in the performance overview of the project
• Measures can be used to create custom measures
• Supports a set of predefined graphs that analyze cost, profit, and earned value information

 

Program Management and Reporting Features:

• Program is a collection of projects linked in a hierarchical fashion
• View and manage workplan and financial information for a group of projects
• Track and report on rolled-up planned, actual, and forecasted effort, cost, and revenue, as well as progress and schedule information for all projects in the program hierarchy
• Top down linking approach facilitates navigation and drill down into the individual linked projects within the program hierarchy

 

Evaluating Customer MDM Options

Many enterprises are faced with the challenge to implement a robust customer MDM solution. One of my clients had a very similar challenge and in this post I have explained in detail the approach we took to evaluate two different customer MDM options and the recommendation we made at the end of the evaluation.

The client in question had Siebel CRM as the front end Prospect and Customer Account creation system. The client had implemented Oracle R12.1.3 Ebusiness suite for their Order to Cash solution.

Customer MDM Option 1:

• Siebel will be the single point of entry for Customers and Address records
• Siebel will integrate with Trillium and D&B
• Oracle EBS will be the source of truth for Customer Records (GOLDEN RECORD)
• Other Enterprise Systems will subscribe to EBS for Customer Data
  
  

Customer MDM Option 2:

• Oracle EBS will integrate with Trillium and D&B
• Oracle EBS will be the source of truth for Customer Records (GOLDEN RECORD)
• Other Systems will subscribe to Oracle EBS for Customer Data
• In future Source systems can be added/removed without a significant change to the process

 

 

Comparision between Option 1 and Option 2:

Recommending Option 1 for the client:

• Recommended approach
• EBS is the master and system of record for Party and Customer Accounts
• Siebel would be the system of record to initiate it with data cleansing and validation
• Leverage client's current knowledge base and use of Trillium, D&B, SDR
• Use Trillium Realtime connector for data cleansing and enrichment
• Define D&B call details for enrichment
• Data Stewarts would exist both within Siebel Apps and EBS for addressing data relating to:
• Customer and Party attributes, including relationships
• EBS specific attributes for customer accounts etc (for example ACH, Credit card No, etc)

Project to Cash Enterprise - need for Order Management

One of my clients was implementing Oracle Ebusiness Suite 12.1.3 and was in construction business. The proposed foot print was to implement the Project to Cash suite of applications. But they were confused whether to implement Oracle Order Management or not.

For Project to Cash enterprises the key design decisions which need to be considered are presented below:

EBS Order Management key features and benefits for Project to Cash enterprises:

• Order references one or more lines, and each line is for a specific Inventory Item. Ship To can be defined at the line level
• Each order line is associated with Pricing through Price List
• Out of the box integration with AR for billing and revenue
• Integrates with Revenue Management functions in AR for deferred revenue and earned revenue accounting based on revenue contingencies and events (for example revenue to be earned only when customer pays in full)
• Native integration with Inventory for shipping and Cost of Goods Sold
• Full integration with Bill of Material and Configurator whereby by selecting a Model (product group for example), system will configure its components and explode each item into the Order Line
• Integration with WIP Manufacturing application to create Work Order for the SO Line and capture Material & Labor costs to the Work Order (based on Bill of Material)
• Native integration with Project Manufacturing for cost collection from Manufacturing (Labor and Material) into Project costing
• Integration with Service Contracts, Installed Base for selling services
• Connects with Credit Management for credit profiling, credit limits, etc

EBS Order Management key constraints for Project to Cash enterprises:

• Doesn’t have the capability to do milestone/progressive billing
• Application assumes that the billing has to be for the full amount of the line value upon shipment. Hence cannot model install job billing requirements.
• Significant work done so far for developing POC revenue cannot be ported to revenue management model and need to be developed from scratch
• Cannot leverage POC revenue work done so far for building completed contracts based revenue in revenue management model
• Forces the use of Bill of Material (BOM) and Work in Process (WIP) applications for being able to associate Labor and Material costs to the Work Order and booking the Cost of Goods Sold upon shipment. Overkill and complex for Project to Cash Enterprise business needs
• Doesn’t integrate with Project Costing and billing
• Projects integration requires implementing Project Manufacturing. Project Manufacturing needs to be turned on and configured for associating the project and task with OM Line for Manufacturing cost collection.
  
  

Credit Card Payment Processing in AR

Many clients will have the requirement to process customer credit card payments in a seamless fashion within Oracle AR. The Oracle Payments (previously iPayments in Rel 11) module enables this functionality working with Oracle AR using a 3 step process:

• Create Invoices: Create invoices in AR with payment method= ‘credit card’
• Credit Card Authorization: Create and approve receipt which includes getting approval codes through Oracle payments and Payment gateway/Payment Processor. Tyco is currently using Chase Paymenttech as a payment processor which Oracle has certified for R12 (Metalink Doc. ID: 471385.1) so we may want to use the same in the future.
• Credit Card Fund Capture: Generating remittances and capture fund through Oracle payments and Payment gateway/Payment Processor. 

What is PSON?

• PSON stands for Payment Server Order Number and this is used by Payments during the funds capture settlement process. This field is located at receipt workbench and is populated by Oracle Payments after authorizing fund.
• Process for ACH processing:
• Oracle Payment, through Funds capture, supports ACH payment and can be integrated with any Payment system for Electronic fund transfer. For Tyco, Payment system can be their remittance banks. 
• Process for ACH processing is same as credit card processing (Create Invoices, Authorization and Fund Capture/ Settlement) with following differences: 
• Authorization step is optional for ACH
• ACH does not block funds during authorization
• Bank information is validated only once and then it is stored as a profile in Oracle payments whereas credit card payment needs approval (PSON) for every transaction.