Integrating Primavera and Oracle Projects

EPM, also known as either Enterprise Project, Programme or Portfolio Management, is the subject of many articles, conference talks, product brochures and conversations in corporate corridors. Having read, attended and been involved in many of these, EPM often boils down to answering the two most frequent questions: How much will it cost? and When will it be delivered?

Despite the plethora of EPM systems available, there are none we know of that can answer both these questions for a project-centric organisation without being integrated with another system. This article is concerned with two of these systems: Primavera P6 and Oracle Projects.

The Strength of Primavera P6?

Primavera have packed an awful lot of functionality into their product, such as risks, issues and document tracking. Each new release seems to bring something else, but despite the new features, Primavera continues to excel at delivering functionality for Planning and Scheduling.

The Work Breakdown Structure in Primavera allows scope to be broken down without having to create dummy activities. Essential for planning what needs to be done without having to detail how it will be done. Every decent planning methodology requires the scope to be as clear as it can before scheduling, and Primavera P6 delivers in this respect.

Primavera’s other big strength is as a scheduling tool with it’s ability to carry out a forward and backward pass using different working patterns. Given a resource requirement, it can also work out how much of a resource is needed and when it is needed. Primavera P6 is able to assign up to five direct costs to a resource, but is not able to calculate overheads. It also understands recurring resources, their profiles, and what is needed when. Primavera P6 knows the dates when work needs to be done and the quantity and name of the resources required to complete that work. In other words it knows about dates and resource quantities.

What Has Oracle Projects Ever Done For Us?

Oracle E-Business Suite is a mass of different products that essentially wraps around the core Oracle Accounting modules of Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Assets, which in turn wrap around the General Ledger module. Oracle Projects is one of the set of applications that is part of the Oracle E-Business Suite. Like Primavera, it lays claim to managing the project portfolio and project lifecycle, but it possesses additional strengths that are often overlooked.

When integrated with Primavera P6, Oracle Projects provides integrated Change Management to the organisation that uses it. It can be fed Baselines from Primavera P6 and use them as a basis for managing change on a project. A lot of tools can do that, but Oracle Projects can get right inside the E-Business Suite and really manage change, integrating the Project Management world’s idea of change with the Finance department’s.

The costing ability of Primavera P6 is limited, having just 5 direct costs per resource, and changing rates requires changing the Rate Type on the individual resource assignment on the activity. It can be painful. Primavera P6 doesn’t do overhead cost calculation and unless the organisation is using wrap rates, Primavera P6 won’t be able to calculate the Project cost. Never mind, because Oracle Projects can come to the rescue. It is able to have multiple ways of calculating costs and can base resource rates on the value of Activity Codes taken from Primavera as well as other criteria. There is a lot of power and flexibility built into Oracle Projects for it to calculate direct costs as well as overheads for Budgets, Forecasts or even Actuals.

Oracle Projects will provide a Project Management view of the accounts system. This helps Project Managers to provide the kind of information to accounts that the Accountants want to know as well as enable them to exercise a degree of joint management. Oracle Projects translates the world of Project Management into the world of Accounts. That amounts to a big step on the way to shared understanding between these two perspectives that often appear to be against each other. One of the biggest issues we have come across is where the finance department configures Oracle Projects as they see projects and not as Project Managers see projects. We know of one household name that has done this, and have struggled in their attempts to implement Earned Value as a result.

Oracle Projects collects or calculates project costs and revenues, maps them to the Chart of Accounts and automatically posts them to the General Ledger. Once a project is setup, there is a tremendous amount of time saved along with a reduction in errors as it eliminates a fair amount of manual intervention?

Technology

Primavera has had a Java API for a while and now they have added Web Services into the mix. The Primavera Web Services provide the same functionality as the Java API, so is definitely a case of something gained. With Oracle AIA and Oracle Fusion Middleware now maturing and available with a Primavera P6 and Oracle Projects Integration, the ability to manage business processes to automatically control both Primavera P6, Oracle Projects and other Oracle E-Business Suite applications in a truly integrated manner becomes a reality. It is not beyond the capability of this set of tools for a Project to be created in Oracle Projects using a standard top-level WBS for the type of project and then have Fusion orchestrate the creation of the project in Primavera P6 as well as invoking other actions in other parts of E-Business Suite, or any other application that has an API that supports what needs to be done.

This will enable traceability between the components that is absent in systems that have not been integrated. Traceability helps to underpin the project data used as a basis for decision-making. It also enables consistency. It is difficult enough getting some people to do one thing right, let alone asking them to be consistent in creating essentially the same thing in a number of tools. It will be good to be able to share data amongst a number of tools, and the latest technology can take us down that path.

Effective Integration

Although there are similar principles, there can be more than one way to map data between Primavera P6 and Oracle Projects. As consultants we often need to walk through scenarios with our clients, because at the very least this must involve Project and Financial Management communities. These two groups often don’t see eye to eye. Educating them to use a common vocabulary and to understand how integrating the schedule and technical performance in Primavera P6 with the cost from Oracle Projects can help support performance based measurement such as Earned Value.