You are on page 1of 50

ORACLE E-BUSINESS SUITE

RELEASE CONTENT DOCUMENT


Projects
Releases 12.1 and 12.2

Prepared by Oracle E-Business Suite Product Development

Last Updated:

April 10, 2015

Copyright 2011, 2015 Oracle Corporation


All Rights Reserved

Table of Contents

1.

Disclaimer

2.

Introduction

2.1.

Purpose of document

3.

New and Changed Features in Projects

3.1.

3.2.

Oracle Grants Accounting

3.1.1. Overview
3.1.2. Release 12.0.6 (RUP6)
3.1.2.1.
Marking encumbrance items for burden recalculation
3.1.3. Release 12.1.1
3.1.3.1.
Award budgeting enhancements
3.1.3.1.1. Budget period validations
3.1.3.1.2. Automatic summarization of project budgets
3.1.3.1.3. Budget Line Sorting Option
3.1.3.2.
Award status inquiry enhancements
3.1.3.2.1. View by budget period
3.1.3.2.2. GL and PA date parameters on find expenditure items window
3.1.3.2.3. GL date parameters on find commitments window
3.1.4. Release 12.1.2
3.1.4.1.
Federal Financial Report (FFR)
3.1.5. Release 12.1.3
3.1.5.1.
Burden Rounding
3.1.5.2.
Award Number Display for Grants Reporting
3.1.6. Release 12.2
3.1.6.1.
Payables Integration Enhancement Support for Self Assessed Tax
3.1.7. Release 12.2.4
3.1.7.1.
Burden Rounding for Sponsored Projects

3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
4
4
4
4
4
5
5
5
5

Oracle Project Billing

3.2.1. Overview
3.2.2. Release 12.1.1
3.2.2.1.
Cascading Billing Schedule Overrides
3.2.2.2.
Agreement Definition Enhancements
3.2.2.3.
Prepayment Receipt Applications
3.2.2.4.
Federal Budgetary Accounting for Project Revenue
3.2.2.5.
Date Effective Funds Consumption
3.2.2.6.
MGT: Invoice Review Performance Improvements
3.2.2.7.
MGT: Unbilled Receivables Aging
3.2.3. Release 12.1.3
3.2.3.1.
Revenue Hold
3.2.3.2.
On Account Credits for Intercompany Invoicing
3.2.4. Release 12.2.2
3.2.4.1.
Standard Invoicing for Adjusted Transactions
3.2.4.2.
UBR/UER as Control Accounts
3.2.5. Release 12.2.4
3.2.5.1.
Enhanced Projects Intercompany Processing

6
6
6
6
6
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
8
8
8
8
8

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

ii

3.2.5.2.
3.2.5.3.
3.2.5.4.
3.2.5.4.1.
3.2.5.4.2.
3.2.5.5.

3.3.

3.4.

3.5.

3.6.

Invoice by Bill Group


Invoice Consolidation
Federal Contract Billing
Cost Plus Fixed Fee Contracts
Fixed Price Progress Payment Contracts
HTML based Project Billing and Funding Setup Pages

8
9
9
9
10
10

Oracle Project Costing

11

3.3.1. Overview
3.3.2. Release 12.1.1
3.3.2.1.
Federal Budgetary Accounting for Project Expenditures
3.3.2.2.
Contingency Worker Clearing Projects
3.3.2.3.
Additional Project Information in Oracle Time and Labor
3.3.3. Release 12.1.3
3.3.3.1.
Delete/Correct PA Periods
3.3.3.2.
Transaction Control Public API
3.3.3.3.
Uncosted Expenditure Batch Correction Options
3.3.4. Release 12.1.3+
3.3.4.1.
Improved Usability and Audit of Funds Check
3.3.5. Release 12.2
3.3.5.1.
Labor Costing Enhancements
3.3.5.1.1. Costing with HR Rates with Support for Multiple Rates per Employee
3.3.5.1.2. New OTL Timecard Layout to Support Rate by Criteria
3.3.5.1.3. Total Time Reporting for Exempt Employees
3.3.5.1.4. Labor Costing using Payroll Actuals
3.3.5.1.5. Labor Cost Accruals
3.3.5.1.6. Expenditure Batch Reversal Program
3.3.5.2.
CMRO Integration Enhancements
3.3.5.3.
Payables Integration Enhancement Support for Self Assessed Tax
3.3.5.4.
Enhanced Cost Collection by Cost Code
3.3.5.5.
Period Close
3.3.5.6.
Payables Integration Enhancement Support for Self Assessed Tax

11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
14
15
15
15
15
15

Oracle Mobile Project Manager for Oracle E-Business Suite

17

3.4.1. Overview
3.4.2. V.1.1.0
3.4.2.1.
Mobile Application Foundation Updates
3.4.2.2.
Accessibility Improvements
3.4.3. V.1.2.0
3.4.3.1.
Android Support
3.4.3.2.
Mobile Foundation Release 3.0 Updates

17
17
17
17
17
17
17

Oracle Project Foundation

18

3.5.1. Overview
3.5.2. Release 12.1.1
3.5.2.1.
New Purge Process for Obsolete Project Data
3.5.2.2.
iSetup
3.5.2.3.
Improved Diagnostics
3.5.3. Release 12.1.2
3.5.3.1.
Enhanced Project List Page
3.5.3.1.1. Main Project List Region
3.5.3.1.2. Worklist and Notification Regions
3.5.3.1.3. Report Views Region
3.5.3.1.4. Bookmarks Region
3.5.3.2.
Streamlined Searches
3.5.3.3.
New Hover Pop Up Windows
3.5.4. Release 12.1.3
3.5.4.1.
Enhanced Project List Page
3.5.4.2.
Enhanced Diagnostics

18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
20

Oracle Project Management

21

3.6.1.

21

Overview

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

iii

3.6.2. Release 12.1.1


3.6.2.1.
New Audit Process for Project Performance Reporting Setup
3.6.2.2.
New Parameters for Refresh Project Performance Data Process
3.6.2.3.
Workplan Enhancements
3.6.2.3.1. Ability to Delete Published Workplan Versions
3.6.2.3.2. Usability Enhancements
3.6.2.3.3. New Public API for Creating, Maintaining, and Deleting Programs
3.6.2.4.
Budgeting and Forecasting Enhancements
3.6.2.4.1. Enhanced Automatic Calculation and Derivation Logic
3.6.2.4.2. Enhanced Handling of Override Rates on Budget / Forecast Lines
3.6.2.4.3. Simplified Addition of Planning Elements and Resources
3.6.2.5.
Self Service Expenditure Inquiry
3.6.2.6.
Reporting Pack for Generation and Distribution of XML Publisher Reports
3.6.2.7.
Budget Integration with Federal Budget Execution and/or 3rd Party Budget
3.6.2.8.
Microsoft Project 2007 Certification
3.6.2.9.
Project Performance Reporting: Additional Measures
3.6.2.10.
Project Performance Reporting: Inter-Project Revenue / Billing Amounts
3.6.2.11.
Supplier Cost Dashboard
3.6.2.12.
Subcontractor Payment Controls
3.6.2.12.1. Support for Pay when Paid Scenarios
3.6.2.12.2. Payment Controls for Subcontract Deliverables
3.6.3. Release 12.1.2
3.6.3.1.
Reporting Performance Improvements
3.6.3.2.
MSP Integration Enhancements
3.6.3.2.1. Download Baseline Cost
3.6.3.2.2. Download Period to Date/Year to Date Cost
3.6.3.3.
Enhanced Change Management
3.6.3.3.1. Streamlined Control Item Definition
3.6.3.3.2. New Supplier Impact Region
3.6.3.3.3. Document Versioning
3.6.3.3.4. Potential Change Order Report for Customer Approval
3.6.3.3.5. Task Creation to Track Change Order Work and Costs
3.6.3.3.6. New Search Capabilities
3.6.3.4.
Project Manager Dashboard for Maintenance of Procurement Deliverables
3.6.3.5.
Improved Supplier Invoice Payment Controls
3.6.3.6.
Deductions to Subcontractor Invoices
3.6.3.7.
Project Security within Oracle Purchasing
3.6.3.8.
Planning by Fiscal Calendars
3.6.3.9.
Planning by Manual Entry
3.6.3.10.
Spread Curve Updates via Task Assignment API
3.6.3.11.
Default Option to Allow Assignment Same As Task Duration
3.6.4. Release 12.1.3
3.6.4.1.
Reporting Performance Improvements
3.6.4.2.
MSP Integration Enhancements
3.6.4.2.1. Support for Non-Shared Task Based Mapping structures
3.6.4.2.2. Support for Partially Shared structure
3.6.4.3.
Enhanced Change Management
3.6.4.3.1. Enhanced Cost & Revenue Planning for Change Documents
3.6.4.4.
Enhanced Retention Invoice Processing for Outstanding Project Deductions
3.6.5. Release 12.2
3.6.5.1.
Planning with HR Rates
3.6.5.2.
Updated Rates when Generating Forecast from the Workplan
3.6.5.3.
Planning without Resource Classes
3.6.5.4.
Planning by Cost Breakdown Structure
3.6.6. Release 12.2.4
3.6.6.1.
Usability: Project Creation and Control Enhancements
3.6.6.1.1. Enhanced Options when Creating New Projects
3.6.6.1.2. Improved Budgeting and Forecasting Page Navigation
3.6.6.1.3. Workplan and Financial Plan Summary
3.6.6.2.
Update Financial Attributes
3.6.6.3.
Move Tasks across Top Tasks
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

21
21
21
21
21
21
22
22
22
22
23
23
23
24
24
24
25
25
25
25
25
26
26
26
26
26
26
26
27
27
27
27
27
27
28
28
28
28
29
29
29
29
29
29
29
30
30
30
30
30
30
30
31
31
32
32
32
32
32
32
32
iv

3.7.

3.8.

3.9.

3.10.

3.6.7. Release 12.2.5


3.6.7.1.
Cost Breakdown Structure for Intercompany and Interproject Billing Projects
3.6.7.2.
PPR Refactoring
3.6.7.3.
Plan, Execute, Monitor & Control Unit Rate Based Projects
3.6.7.4.
Budgetary Controls for Financial Plans

32
32
32
33
33

Oracle Project Contracts

35

3.7.1. Overview
3.7.2. Release 12.1.3+
3.7.2.1.
Copy Status when Creating a Contract from Template
3.7.2.2.
User Attributes Validation
3.7.2.3.
Provide Contract Access to Contingent Workers
3.7.2.4.
Project Contracts Public APIs
3.7.3. Release 12.2.4

35
35
35
35
35
35
36

Oracle Project Procurement

38

3.8.1. Overview
3.8.2. Release 12.2.4
3.8.2.1.
Enable Projects for Procurement Planning
3.8.2.2.
Create and Manage Project Procurement Plans
3.8.2.3.
Project Management Command Center View
3.8.2.4.
Project Buyer Command Center View
3.8.2.5.
Item Analysis
3.8.2.6.
Supplier Analysis
3.8.3. Release 12.2.5
3.8.3.1.
Manage Procurement of Services

38
38
38
38
38
38
39
39
39
39

Oracle Project Resource Management

41

3.9.1. Overview
3.9.2. Release 12.0.3 (RUP3)
3.9.2.1.
Viewing At-Completion Amounts
3.9.2.2.
Choosing Displayed Currency
3.9.2.3.
Reporting Plan Type Data in Context
3.9.3. Release 12.1.1
3.9.3.1.
Resource Search by eMail Address
3.9.3.2.
Resource Search by Person Type
3.9.3.3.
Streamlined Navigation on Staffing Home
3.9.3.4.
Cross Validation of Project and Assignment Dates
3.9.3.5.
Defaulting of Work Patterns From and To Dates
3.9.3.6.
Improved Exception Handling of Maintain Project Resources Process
3.9.3.7.
New Public APIs for Resource Management
3.9.3.8.
Organization Authority: Obsolete Forecast Authority
3.9.4. Release 12.1.2
3.9.4.1.
Update of Start and End Dates for Multiple Requirements
3.9.4.2.
Select Multiple Roll Ups in a Personalized View
3.9.4.3.
Support for Schedule Shifts while Maintaining Work Patterns
3.9.4.4.
Updateable Fields on Scheduled People Page

41
41
41
41
41
41
41
42
42
42
43
43
43
43
43
43
44
44
44

Advanced Project Planning and Control

45

3.10.1. Release 12.1.3.4


45
3.10.1.1.
Advanced Project Planning and Control (formerly Endeca Extensions for Oracle Project Management)
45
3.10.2. Release 12.2.4
45
3.10.2.1.
Advanced Project Planning and Control (formerly Endeca Extensions for Oracle Project Management)
45
3.10.3. Release 12.2.5
45
3.10.3.1.
Advanced Project Planning and Controls
45

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

1.

Disclaimer
This Release Content Document (RCD) describes product features that are proposed for
the specified release of the Oracle E-Business Suite. This document describes new or
changed functionality only. Existing functionality from prior releases is not described. It
is intended solely to help you assess the business benefits of upgrading to the specified
release of the Oracle E-Business Suite.
This document in any form, software or printed matter, contains proprietary information
that is the exclusive property of Oracle. Your access to and use of this confidential
material is subject to the terms and conditions of your Oracle Software License and
Service Agreement, which has been executed and with which you agree to comply. This
document and information contained herein may not be disclosed, copied, reproduced or
distributed to anyone outside Oracle without prior written consent of Oracle. This
document is not part of your license agreement nor can it be incorporated into any
contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates.
This document is for informational purposes only and is intended solely to assist you in
planning for the implementation and upgrade of the product features described. It is not a
commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon
in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or
functionality described in this document remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.
Due to the nature of the product architecture, it may not be possible to safely include all
features described in this document without risking significant destabilization of the code.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Purpose of document

2.

Introduction
2.1.

Purpose of document
This Release Content Document (RCD) communicates information about new or changed
functionality introduced in Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2, and in
subsequent Release Update Packs (RUPs) and off-cycle patches. For your convenience,
it also includes new or changed functionality introduced in the RUPs for Release 12,
including 12.0.2 through 12.0.7.
The features and enhancements described in this document are grouped by product, and
then by the release in which they first became available, for example, Release 12.1.1.
Features released in an off-cycle patch have a special designation for example, a feature
released after 12.1.1, but before 12.1.2, is designated as Release 12.1.1+.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Purpose of document

3.

New and Changed Features in Projects


3.1.

Oracle Grants Accounting


3.1.1.

Overview
Oracle Grants Accounting provides your organization with the ability to completely track
grants and funded projects from inception to final reporting. Oracle Grants Accounting
provides a fully integrated system that supports multi-funded projects and the required
compliance terms and conditions by award. Oracle Grants Accounting supports
validation of allowable costs as well as flexible budgetary controls to ensure fiscal
responsibility.

3.1.2.

Release 12.0.6 (RUP6)


3.1.2.1.

Marking encumbrance items for burden recalculation

Encumbrance items are marked for burden recalculation if either the indirect cost
schedule on the Compliances tab is updated or records are updated, inserted or deleted in
the Override Schedules window.

3.1.3.

Release 12.1.1
3.1.3.1. Award budgeting enhancements
3.1.3.1.1. Budget period validations
Budget periods will not be validated across award budgets when those awards fund a
single project. This provides the flexibility to establish award budgets based on the
actual duration of the award, while not being confined based on the existing budgets
already established for the project.
3.1.3.1.2. Automatic summarization of project budgets
Now that you can establish award budgets with any entry method and period
definitions, regardless of the previously created budgets for a project, the award
budgets will still automatically summarize to a project budget viewable in Project
Status Inquiry. Two profile options have been added to identify the budget entry
methods that will be used to summarize the project budgets.
3.1.3.1.3. Budget Line Sorting Option
For a budget that is established with date range periods, a sorting option is available
on the budget lines window. You can now choose to sort the lines by Resource
name, or by effective dates. This provides the flexibility to view the budget lines by
period or by budgeted resource.
3.1.3.2. Award status inquiry enhancements
3.1.3.2.1. View by budget period
A new region has been added to the Find Award Status window that enables the view
to be limited to a single period, range of periods, or inception to date for a particular
award. The parameters will reflect the budget periods entered on the award budget.
3.1.3.2.2. GL and PA date parameters on find expenditure items window
GL and PA date parameters have been added to the Find Expenditure Items window.
3.1.3.2.3. GL date parameters on find commitments window

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Grants Accounting

GL Date parameters have been added to the Find Commitments window.

3.1.4.

Release 12.1.2
3.1.4.1. Federal Financial Report (FFR)
Most federal grants require recipients to periodically submit reports on their grants
financial progress. In the United States, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
have consolidated the two most common financial reports, the Financial Status Report
(FSR or SF269/SF269A) and the Federal Cash Transaction Report (FCTR or SF
272/SF272A), into a single form. OMB is requiring that federal agencies transition to
the FFR by September 30, 2009.
To comply with this change, Oracle Grants Accounting has introduced a new FFR report.
To allow for easy transition, the Financial Status Report and the Federal Cash
Transaction Report are still available for use or for data verification.

3.1.5.

Release 12.1.3
3.1.5.1. Burden Rounding
Standard accounting practices and regulations to comply with federal and nonfederal
sponsored projects require invoices to match award amounts. Burden and rounding
calculations can cause differences between the invoice amounts and the supporting
documentation for revenue and expenditures
The draft revenue and invoice processes (GMS: Generate Draft Revenue and GMS:
Generate Draft Invoice) have been enhanced to calculate the difference between the
burden transaction cost and the burden amount on the invoice to resolve any differences
between the invoice and revenue amounts, existing . The differential rounding amount is
included in the revenue and invoice amounts to reconcile the award invoice amount with
the cost amount.
3.1.5.2. Award Number Display for Grants Reporting
Displaying the award number in transaction exception, costing and funds check reports
enables users to identify the appropriate award transaction for further processing.
Additional award information is displayed in the following reports:

GMS: Costing and Funds Check on Straight Time Labor

GMS: Costing and Funds Check on Straight Time Labor for a Range of Projects

GMS: Distribute Supplier Cost Adjustments and Funds Check

GMS: Distribute Supplier Cost Adjustments and Funds Check for a Range of
Projects

GMS: Costing and Funds Check on Usage and Miscellaneous Costs

GMS: Costing and Funds Check on Expense Report Adjustments

EXC: Transaction Exception Details by PA Period


Note: Report sections applicable to Grants include Accounts Payable
Invoice Exceptions, Uncosted Transactions, and Costing Exceptions

EXC: Transaction Exception Details by GL Period


Note: Report sections applicable to Grants include Accounts Payable
Invoice Exceptions, Uncosted Transactions, and Costing Exceptions

AUD: Supplier Costs Interface Audit

PRC: Transaction Import

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Grants Accounting

3.1.6.

Release 12.2
3.1.6.1. Payables Integration Enhancement Support for Self Assessed Tax
Self assessed tax amounts are taxes for which a purchaser is liable. While the self
assessed tax amount is computed on the supplier invoice, it is not payable to the supplier.
In Release 12, E-Business Tax and Oracle Payables introduced new functionality to
calculate and store self-assessed tax amounts. These tax amounts are interfaced to Oracle
Grants Accounting and recorded as a project expense.

3.1.7.

Release 12.2.4
3.1.7.1. Burden Rounding for Sponsored Projects
Organizations may receive awards for various projects. To claim funds, the award
recipient needs to bill the sponsor for cost and overheads incurred. Any variation between
overheads calculated on cost and billing could result in audit objections. To meet these
regulatory and accounting reporting requirements easily, the revenue and invoice process
is enhanced to eliminate rounding differences and match invoice awards with actual
expenditures to the penny.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Grants Accounting

3.2.

Oracle Project Billing


3.2.1.

Overview
Oracle Project Billing helps improve cash flow and project profitability by streamlining
and managing your billing process. You can easily review and manage invoices, revenue,
and funding for all your projects.
This release focuses on key requirements of the U.S. Federal government, including
tracking and handling of reimbursable agreements, advance payments, and revenue
accounting. However, a majority of the features are available and will be beneficial to all
industries.

3.2.2.

Release 12.1.1
3.2.2.1. Cascading Billing Schedule Overrides
You can now streamline the process of updating billing schedules information either for
all tasks in a project or for all subtasks of a task. To support this enhancement, two new
Tools menu options are available in the Billing Schedules window. When you update bill
rate or burden schedule information at a project level, you can choose to copy the updates
to the project tasks. When you update the billing schedules information for a summary
task, you can choose to copy the updates to all subtasks. In addition, when you choose a
copy option, you can select whether to apply the updates to all tasks, or to exclude tasks.
THIS FEATURE WAS ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 11.5.10 FP.M RUP3
3.2.2.2. Agreement Definition Enhancements
To better control billing against agreements and provide more information on
agreements, the following new agreement fields are available:

Start date: to more accurately control the duration of the agreement

Customer order number and accounting reference: to track your customers


references for the agreement

Billing sequence number: to control the order in which agreements are used for
billing purposes

Advance Required checkbox: to control if an advance payment is required before


invoicing can occur

15 additional descriptive flexfield attributes (bringing the total to 25): to track


any other information

3.2.2.3. Prepayment Receipt Applications


Prepayment (advance payment) receipts entered in Oracle Receivables can now be
associated with Agreements. These receipts will then be automatically applied to the
Project invoices when they are interfaced to Oracle Receivables. This provides the
ability to earmark cash for a specific agreement up front, and draw down that cash
balance automatically.
An Apply Receipt button is added that allows you to choose the receipts to associate with
the Agreement. A new flag is added to the agreement to identify if an advance is
required for the agreement. When an advance is required, the total funding cannot exceed
the amount of prepayments that have been associated with the agreement. In conjunction
with a hard limit, this ensures that you will not be able to bill the customer more than the
amount received as an advance.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Billing

A client extension is available to determine which customers are required to provide an


advance payment. Based on the outcome of the extension, the advance required flag will
be enabled or disabled. A new security function allows you to grant users the ability to
override the flag. The combination of the extension and security function allows you to
ensure that the advance required flag is set appropriately.
3.2.2.4. Federal Budgetary Accounting for Project Revenue
Additional journal entry definitions are available in Oracle Subledger Accounting for the
Federal Budgetary entries required for revenue accounting.
3.2.2.5. Date Effective Funds Consumption
A new attribute on the Project Type form allows customers to enable date effective funds
consumption. When this option is enabled, cost and event transaction dates must fall
within the agreement start and end dates to be billed against an agreement. In addition,
transactions are only billed against the agreement if the full transaction amount can be
funded. This applies to both revenue and invoice generation. When the option is not
enabled, revenue generation supports partial billing for transactions.
3.2.2.6. MGT: Invoice Review Performance Improvements
Enhancements were made to the MGT: Invoice Review report to improve performance
and support the following new runtime parameters:

Project Status
Project Closed After Date
Project Range

3.2.2.7. MGT: Unbilled Receivables Aging


Enhancements were made to the MGT: Unbilled Receivables Aging report to improve
performance and support the following new runtime parameters:

3.2.3.

Project Status
Project Closed After Date
Project Range

Release 12.1.3
3.2.3.1. Revenue Hold
As circumstances change, users may require the flexibility to hold invoices until certain
expenditure items or events are resolved. Users can use the revenue hold option to place
selected transactions on hold to provide time for issues to be resolved. Since invoice
generation is dependent on revenue generation, revenue holds also prevent the generation
of invoices for the held expenditures.
3.2.3.2. On Account Credits for Intercompany Invoicing
Companies that utilize Projects throughout their global operations may be required to
process thousands of adjustments and credits to their intercompany billing on a monthly
basis. Processing credit memos for each adjustment and associating each credit memo to
the original invoice can be clerically intensive, causing inaccuracy and an inefficient use
of resources. This is particularly difficult when adjustments are made to expenditure bills
processed in a prior period and the original intercompany invoice has been paid.
With on-account credits, users are able to choose the optimal method to process
intercompany credit adjustments; they can either apply credit memos to the original

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Billing

invoice or generate an on account credit. When the adjustment applies to prior periods,
using on account credits greatly reduces manual effort by eliminating the need to unapply each credit memo before netting the credit memo against the current billing period.

3.2.4.

Release 12.2.2
3.2.4.1. Standard Invoicing for Adjusted Transactions
Prior to this release when an expenditure item is adjusted after it has been billed, the
invoicing process will generate a credit memo to reverse the billing of the original item
and will then include the adjusted transaction on the next standard invoice. With this
release, the reversal transaction and the adjusted transaction can both be included on the
next standard invoice eliminating the creation of the credit memo.
To control processing behavior, a new attribute has been added to the billing set up form
at the project and task level. The valid values for the new attribute are as follows:

None (Default): Retain existing functionality. Create credit memos when any
expenditure item is adjusted after it has been billed.

Labor Accruals Reversals Only: Include labor accrual reversals on standard


invoices. For all other adjustment reversal transactions, create credit memos.

Labor Only: Include adjustment reversal transactions for labor on standard


invoices. For adjustments to non-labor transactions, create credit memos.
All Transactions: Include all adjustment reversal transactions on standard
invoices.

3.2.4.2. UBR/UER as Control Accounts


Set up Unbilled Receivable or Unearned Revenue (UBR/UER) as control accounts to
prevent users from entering manual journals.

3.2.5.

Release 12.2.4
3.2.5.1. Enhanced Projects Intercompany Processing
Global organizations that execute projects across the world typically generate
intercompany transactions across legal entities. In EBS, multiple legal entities may be
defined within the same operating unit. Each entity is required to generate legal
documents and accounting to meet statutory requirements. For instance, the intercompany
transactions may be generated when a project managed by one legal entity requires the
goods or services to that belong to a second legal entity; or resources owned by the first
legal entity are used on a project that is owned by second legal entity.
Using enhanced projects intercompany processing you can borrow resources without risk
of statutory non-compliance, automate end to end flow, improve cash flow by billing
customers accurately, and minimize manual effort and cost of reconciling intercompany
transactions. The enhanced intercompany processing provides a method to generate legal
documentation for transactions spanning legal entities within the same operating unit.
The provider legal entity creates a Receivables invoice, which is interfaced as a Payables
invoice to the receiver legal entity.
3.2.5.2. Invoice by Bill Group
Customers may specify complex billing requirements for large projects or project
providers could break out bills to speed up collections. Some examples are

Invoicing is not based on financial plan (does not map to top tasks) e.g. project is
structured by building but bills are required separately for material and labor.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Billing

Travel expenses need to be billed separately from labor cost as they are
scrutinized in detail to speed up cash flow

Labor is billed weekly and material cost is billed monthly aligned to project
providers payment cycles

Multiple billers are assigned to a single large project

With the billing group enhancement you have flexibility to generate billing by user
criteria, bill to meet customer specific requirements, and improve cash flow, For instance,
when multiple billing clerks are assigned to a project they can create draft invoices
simultaneously, approve draft invoices in any order, release approved Invoices in the
order they are approved, and delete a single approved invoice. They can also process
invoice billing cycles at desired frequencies appropriate for the types of cost.
3.2.5.3. Invoice Consolidation
Users in large projects are frequently required to create consolidated invoices to meet
customer or internal billing requirements for a single invoice that consolidates billing
transactions across projects, programs, contracts, contract lines, master projects, and
agreements.
Users can define a consolidated billing group, along with the associated billing and
consolidation attributes, and associate the consolidated bill group to the projects to be
consolidated in the invoice. During invoice generation, users have the option to select the
consolidated bill group to deliver one consolidated invoice instead of multiple individual
invoices to the customer.
3.2.5.4. Federal Contract Billing
Invoicing and payments for federal contractors in the Aerospace and Defense industries
are governed by the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or FAR. Contracts defined by
federal contractors require detailed commercial payments terms that specify how invoices
can be sent, how payments can be received, financial reporting requirements, information
security, as well as detailed information to support audit regulations linking payments to
contracts, contract lines, subcontract lines, funding information and ACRNs (Accounting
Code Reference Numbers).
With this release, the integration between Oracle Projects and Oracle Project Contracts
has been enhanced to support businesses required to comply with these FAR regulations.
Oracle Project Contracts allows the storage of information related to Accounting Code
Reference Numbers (ACRNs) and payment instructions as well as enables users to
perform fund allocations using ACRNs. This information is then interfaced to Oracle
Project Billing in order to invoice the customer based on these specifications and
maintain the required audit trail.
The Federal Contract Billing enhancement specifically addresses billing requirements for
Federal Contracts relating to:

Cost Plus Fixed Fee Contracts (including Award and/or Incentive Fee)

Fixed Price Progress Payment Contracts

3.2.5.4.1. Cost Plus Fixed Fee Contracts


Cost reimbursement contracts, as defined in Oracle Project Contracts, can include
fixed fee, incentive fee and/or award fees and may be subject to withholding. Fixed
fees are billed as a percentage of cost and in some cases cost of money or some
expenses may be excluded or limited from the amount eligible for fee billing. These
detailed payment and invoicing terms as regulated by the FAR guidelines can now be
entered and maintained in Oracle Project Contracts.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Billing

This contract information is utilized by Oracle Project Billing for invoicing


compliance purposes. All contracts can be billed with reference to the contract,
contract line / sub line from inception to date. Invoices can be grouped by contract
line / sub line as requested by the government agency including allocation by ACRN
for any payments received. The details of the contract, any modifications and billing
details for progress payments and cost based reimbursements or fees are also
maintained for DFAS/DCAA audit purposes (ACRN funded, billed, funds remaining
and fund expiration dates). And finally, invoice presentment using federal billing
forms SF1034 and SF 1035 is also supported.
3.2.5.4.2.

Fixed Price Progress Payment Contracts

Fixed price contracts, as defined in Oracle Project Contracts, can include incentive
fees and progress payments. These contracts generally include a clause for the
contractor to bill progress payments based on costs using federal billing form
SF1443. These progress payments are closely administered through periodic reviews,
reviewing and approving progress payment requests, analyzing liquidations, and
taking other actions to protect the government's interests.
In addition to progress bills, contractors need to generate shipment billing with each
delivery. Progress payments are adjusted through a process of liquidation calculated
by the government agency.
This contract information is utilized by Oracle Project Billing for invoicing
compliance purposes. All contracts can be billed with reference to the contract,
contract line / sub line from inception to date. Invoices can be grouped by contract
line / sub line as requested by the government agency including allocation by ACRN
for any payments received. The details of the contract, any modifications and billing
details for progress payments and cost based reimbursements or fees are also
maintained for DFAS/DCAA audit purposes (ACRN funded, billed, funds remaining
and fund expiration dates).
3.2.5.5. HTML based Project Billing and Funding Setup Pages
To avoid multiple switching between Forms and HTML pages, all screens used to
create and manage billing setups and funding arrangements for a project have been
re-written in HTML.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Billing

10

3.3.

Oracle Project Costing


3.3.1.

Overview
Oracle Project Costing helps you improve the bottom line of your projects by integrating
and controlling all project costs. You can effectively manager project budgets, streamline
processing, automate resource sharing administration and capitalize assets more
efficiently.

3.3.2.

Release 12.1.1
3.3.2.1. Federal Budgetary Accounting for Project Expenditures
Additional journal entry definitions are now available in Oracle Subledger Accounting
for the Federal Budgetary entries required for cost accounting. Budgetary accounting
entries can now be created for all expenditures imported, entered or adjusted in Oracle
Projects.
3.3.2.2. Contingency Worker Clearing Projects
A new flag is available to identify a project as a contingency worker clearing project.
When this project is referenced on a Purchase Order, Oracle Time and Labor allows
contingency workers consuming that purchase order to charge time to any approved
project. This new functionality provides improved support for contingent workers who
are hired to work on multiple projects over the life of their engagement.
3.3.2.3. Additional Project Information in Oracle Time and Labor
The project views that control the display of project data in Oracle Time and Labor,
PA_ONLINE_PROJECTS_V and PA_ONLINE_TASKS_V, have been enhanced to
display the Project and Task Names as well as the Project and Task Numbers. Because
new columns have been added to the views, any customer who has customized the views
will need to ensure their customizations are updated to accommodate the new attributes.

3.3.3.

Release 12.1.3
3.3.3.1. Delete/Correct PA Periods
Customers may need the option to change a PA period after is has been defined.
However, once a project period is defined, it cannot be deleted without reversing any
impacted transactions in the incorrect period.
In review mode, the Period Deletion Output Listing provides users a preview or advisory
PA period deletion report that displays PA periods that cannot be deleted and periods
eligible for deletion. The report lists impacted transactions, budgets and schedule details
that require correction before deleting the PA period. This also reports follow-up user
actions required after the period is deleted (e.g., create new replacement periods, or resummarize budgets). In final mode, the Period Deletion Output Listing deletes the
eligible PA periods and provides an output report that lists all of the PA periods deleted
by the PRC: Delete Periods process.
3.3.3.2. Transaction Control Public API
Users may be required to maintain transaction control at multiple levels of a project (e.g.,
task or expenditure) during various phases of the project. Manually updating each
change for multiple resources, multiple projects, and multiple tasks can be very laborious,
causing inaccuracies and inefficient use of resources. The Transaction Control API
enables users to generate mass updates to transaction controls by project and/or task,

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Costing

11

expenditure category, expenditure type, and employee with the ability to make each
control inclusive or exclusive.
3.3.3.3. Uncosted Expenditure Batch Correction Options
When expenditure batches are created or imported through custom transaction sources,
errors may be detected at any of several points in the expenditure entry process. Errors
may even be detected after a batch has been released. The option to Update Released
Expenditures enable users to update and/or correct uncosted and released expenditures
imported through custom transaction sources allows users to update and make data entry
corrections to pre-approved expenditure batches.

3.3.4.

Release 12.1.3+
3.3.4.1. Improved Usability and Audit of Funds Check
Users can easily correct errors and speed up resolution of issues identified by the funds
check flow. Users can view balances in the enhanced Funds Check Balances screen that
displays summary balances for the project, and then drill down into the details of
commitments and actual expenses. The enhanced Funds Check Transaction Results
screen then provides the required corrective action to resolve the identified issue.

3.3.5.

Release 12.2
3.3.5.1. Labor Costing Enhancements
The following new features are provided to increase flexibility and reduce maintenance
overhead.
3.3.5.1.1. Costing with HR Rates with Support for Multiple Rates per Employee
A new rate source option of HR has been added to labor costing rules. When this
option is selected, labor rates will be derived from HR Rate by Criteria matrices.
Rate by Criteria is a feature within Oracle Human Resources (HR) that allows
multiple rates to be defined for an employee based on criteria such as the assigned
project or the type of work performed or the location where work occurred.
Rate by Criteria matrices can also be used to define prevailing rate tables in order to
comply with the Davis-Bacon Act. The Davis-Bacon and Related Acts apply to
contractors and subcontractors performing on federally funded or assisted contracts
in excess of $2,000 for the construction, alteration, or repair (including painting and
decorating) of public buildings or public works. The act stipulates that contractors
and subcontractors must pay their laborers and mechanics employed under the
contract no less than the locally prevailing wages and fringe benefits for
corresponding work on similar projects in the area.
3.3.5.1.2. New OTL Timecard Layout to Support Rate by Criteria
When HR Rate by Criteria matrices are used to store and maintain employee labor
rates, additional attributes must be captured on the timecard in order to retrieve the
appropriate rate to calculate project cost amounts. Therefore, a new OTL timecard
layout has been provided with new fields at the line level to capture job, location and
work type. New online views are also available for each new attribute to allow
customers to customize the list of values displayed to employees during time entry.
3.3.5.1.3. Total Time Reporting for Exempt Employees
The US Federal Government (DCAA Contract Audit Manual, Section 9) requires
contractors to record all labor hours worked whether they are paid or not. This is
because labor rates and labor overhead costs can be affected by total hours worked as
opposed to total hours billed. While all hours worked must be recorded, contractors

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Costing

12

cannot charge the government for more than was actually paid to the employee.
Therefore a new option called Total Time Costing has been added to Labor Costing
Rules to indicate that effective rates should be applied when costing labor
transactions. The effective rate is calculated using the following formula:
Employee Base Hours / Total Hours Worked * Employee Cost Rate
When an employees total hours worked exceeds the base hours specified on the
costing rule, cost amounts are calculated by multiplying recorded hours by the
calculated effective rate.
3.3.5.1.4. Labor Costing using Payroll Actuals
A new costing method of Actual has been added to labor costing rules. When this
method is selected, labor costs are not calculated by Project Costing but are
interfaced from Oracle Payroll or from a 3rd party payroll system. A new setup form
has been provided to define the payroll elements to be interfaced to Projects and the
distribution method to use when allocating each pay amount to recorded time card
entries or creating miscellaneous project labor transactions. Amounts can be
distributed based on hours or dollars and can be stored as raw cost or burden cost.
The tables below provide a distribution example:
Table 1 Timecard for Employee A
Project
A
A
B
B
B
B

Task
1
1
1
1
2
3

Expend Type
Regular Pay
1-1/2 Pay
Regular Pay
Regular Pay
Regular Pay
Regular Pay
Total

SLF*
ST
OT
ST
ST
ST
ST

Date
07-Feb-05
07-Feb-05
08-Feb-05
09-Feb-05
10-Feb-05
11-Feb-05

Hours
8
3
8
8
8
8
43

*Project System Linkage Function

Table 2 Payroll Cost for Employee A


Pay Element
Regular Salary
Overtime Salary
Project A Bonus
401K
Total

Expend
Type
Regular Pay
1-1/2 Pay
Bonus
401K

Amount
400
50
100
22
572

Cost
Type
Raw
Raw
Raw
Burden

Distribution
Method
ST Hours
OT Hours
None
Total Raw Amount

Table 3 Costing Results for Employee A


Project
A
A
B
B
B
B
A
A
B
B
B

Task
1
1
1
1
2
3
1
1
1
2
3

Expend Type
Regular Pay
1-1/2 Pay
Regular Pay
Regular Pay
Regular Pay
Regular Pay
Bonus
401K
401K
401K
401K

SLF*
ST
OT
ST
ST
ST
ST
MISC
BTC
BTC
BTC
BTC

Date
07-Feb-05
07-Feb-05
08-Feb-05
09-Feb-05
10-Feb-05
11-Feb-05
07-Feb-05

Hrs
8
3
8
8
8
8

Cost Amount
Raw
Burden
80
50
80
80
80
80
100
9.2
6.4
3.2
3.2

*Project System Linkage Function


Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Costing

13

3.3.5.1.5. Labor Cost Accruals


When the new costing method of Actual is enabled, a new option allows cost
accruals to be calculated by Project Costing and then reversed when payroll amounts
are interfaced from Payroll. This provides project managers a view of labor costs in
between payroll runs and also allows the transactions to be billed if desired. A setup
option provides the ability to enable or disable billing of labor cost accruals.
The cost accrual is calculated by multiplying hours by the employee rate. When the
payroll actual amounts are interfaced, the accrual transaction is fully reversed. The
reversal transaction will be accounted in the same period as the payroll actual
transaction.
3.3.5.1.6. Expenditure Batch Reversal Program
Oracle Payroll has a roll back feature that allows users to reverse or retry a payroll
run. To accommodate this feature and to support error corrections, a new program
has been introduced that will reverse the costing of labor transactions and reestablish
them as uncosted transactions. If an error is detected in a payroll run after it has been
interfaced to Projects, the roll back feature can be used in Oracle Payroll to delete the
run results and the expenditure batch reversal program can be used in Projects to
reverse the cost transactions. When the payroll error is corrected and a new payroll
run is complete, the new amounts can then be interfaced to Projects to properly cost
the project transactions.
The expenditure batch reversal program can also be used when the wrong costing
method is inadvertently applied to a set of transactions. For example, if the labor
transactions for an organization were costed using the Actual method and they
should have been costed with a method of Standard, the reversal program can be
ran to reverse the transactions, the costing method can be changed, and the
transactions can then be reprocessed with the correct costing method.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Costing

14

3.3.5.2. CMRO Integration Enhancements


Oracle Projects integration with Complex Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (CMRO)
has been enhanced to support non-routine, unplanned repairs. Prior to this release, a
project is created for each maintenance visit and a project task is created for each CMRO
task. This integration works well to collect costs for schedule work. However, if the
technician decides to do preventive maintenance or discovers other repairs that should be
made to prevent future downtime, the cost related to these unplanned, non-routine tasks
could not be easily tracked in Oracle Projects. In this release, users can now create
additional project tasks to track the additional work.
Also in this release, users also have the ability to associate a new CMRO visit with an
existing project. Top tasks are used in Oracle Projects to track the cost associated with
each maintenance visit. This allows users to track all maintenance visits under a single
project. Refer to the Service Management Release Content Document for more details.
3.3.5.3. Payables Integration Enhancement Support for Self Assessed Tax
Self assessed tax amounts are taxes that you are liable for, but that do not appear on the
payables invoice. Self assessed taxes are also known as reverse charge or use taxes in
certain tax regimes. In Release 12, E-Business Tax and Oracle Payables introduced new
functionality to calculate and store self-assessed tax amounts. In Release 12.2, the tax
amounts are interfaced to Oracle Projects and recorded as a project expense.
3.3.5.4. Enhanced Cost Collection by Cost Code
Cost collection by cost code lets you use Oracle Project Costing to include cost codes on
all of the transactions that you collect for your projects that are enabled for cost
breakdown planning. Cost breakdown planning is introduced in Oracle Project
Management and provides a new, standardized, user-defined cost classification structure,
modified project setup to enable cost breakdown planning, and enhanced planning and
forecasting by cost code. These features enhance project control that enables you to use
standard cost classification codes for planning, tracking and reporting project costs
designed to help you reduce the size, complexity and maintenance effort of workplans
and financial plans. Enhanced cost planning empowers your ability to control projects by
providing the right cost descriptions for billing, benchmarking and estimating.
Enhanced cost collection by cost code means you select both a task and cost code, based
on defined associations in your project task setup, during time card entry in Oracle Time
and Labor, while entering project cost distributions on purchase orders in Procurement
and invoices in Payables, or when entering expense reports in iExpenses that are charged
to a project. Enhanced search functionality in each module enables full or partial value
searches on task number or task name including partial values for cost codes attributes.
You can also enter pre-approved batches by defining the task and cost code combination
to assign to each imported transaction. The task and cost code values are used to match
the expenditures to the project plans for reporting actuals. You can view the cost code
number and description on each expenditure item.
3.3.5.5. Period Close
The validations for period close are enhanced for transactions for which SLA accounting
is pending the following transactions, transactions that are not interfaced to projects and
transactions for which cost is not distributed.
3.3.5.6. Payables Integration Enhancement Support for Self Assessed Tax
Self assessed tax amounts are taxes for which a purchaser is liable. While the self
assessed tax amount is computed on the supplier invoice, it is not payable to the supplier.
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Costing

15

In Release 12, E-Business Tax and Oracle Payables introduced new functionality to
calculate and store self-assessed tax amounts. These tax amounts are interfaced to Oracle
Projects and recorded as a project expense.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Costing

16

3.4.

Oracle Mobile Project Manager for Oracle E-Business Suite


3.4.1.

Overview
With Oracle Mobile Project Manager for Oracle E-Business Suite, project managers and
staff can monitor project status and take action on the go.

View and search my projects list

Monitor overall project status in dashboard view

Contact team members and customer contacts

View open payments summary with drilldown to supplier invoices

View open receivables summary with drilldown to customer invoices

View open issues and change orders

Monitor alerts for budget exceptions and past due transactions

Collaborate in transaction context using device features like email, phone, and
text

Oracle Mobile Project Manager for Oracle E-Business Suite is compatible with Oracle EBusiness Suite 12.1.3 and 12.2.3 and above. To use this app, you must be a user of Oracle
Project Costing, with mobile services configured on the server side by your administrator.
Users of Oracle Project Billing and Oracle Project Management get additional capability
for customer billing, issues, and change orders.

3.4.2.

V.1.1.0
3.4.2.1. Mobile Application Foundation Updates

Improvements in login and configuration flow.

Ability to change the server URL without reinstalling the app.

Diagnostics improvements.

3.4.2.2. Accessibility Improvements

3.4.3.

Improvements in related information messages, contextual tab bar and Person


contact card.

V.1.2.0
3.4.3.1. Android Support
In previous versions, Oracle Mobile Approvals for Oracle E-Business Suite was available
only for iOS devices. Starting with version 1.2.0, the app is now available for Android
devices as well.
3.4.3.2. Mobile Foundation Release 3.0 Updates

Changes to support both iOS and Android with the same client code

Ability to update server URL from Connection Details page

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Mobile Project Manager for Oracle E-Business Suite

17

3.5.

Oracle Project Foundation


3.5.1.

Overview
Oracle Project Foundation provides the common foundation (functionality) shared across
the products in the Oracle Enterprise Project Management Solution. The purpose of
Oracle Project Foundation is to package all the common elements of Oracle Projects into
a single place.
Oracle Project Foundation accompanies all of the Oracle Projects applications providing
you with a rich set of features, including:

Period Definition
Calendar Definition
Organization Definition
Resource Definition and Reporting
Project and Organization Security
Project and Task Definition
Organization Forecasting
Utilization
Archive and Purge

Oracle Project Foundation also facilitates the integration of Oracle Projects suite with
other Oracle Applications including Oracle HRMS, Oracle Financials, Oracle CRM, and
Oracle Supply Chain applications.

3.5.2.

Release 12.1.1
3.5.2.1. New Purge Process for Obsolete Project Data
This release includes a new concurrent process, ADM: Purge Obsolete Projects Data.
You can use this new process to purge forecast items associated with requirements,
assignments, and unassigned time. You can also purge obsolete project workflow
information, and exception data generated for project resource exception reporting.
THIS FEATURE WAS ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 11.5.10 FP.M RUP3
3.5.2.2. iSetup
This is the introduction of an API to enable migration of setup entities across instances
are now available for all Oracle Project modules. iSetup also handles standard and
comparison reporting of master entities in addition to data migration.
3.5.2.3. Improved Diagnostics
All R11i diagnostics scripts are now available for R12.1. In addition, some new scripts
have been added to support new R12.1 functionality and architecture changes.

3.5.3.

Release 12.1.2
3.5.3.1. Enhanced Project List Page
The Project List page is often the main hub that users interact with when accessing
Oracle Projects. In an effort to make this page more informative and streamline access to
common functions, several enhancements have been added to the Project List page.
3.5.3.1.1. Main Project List Region
The following enhancements apply to the main region of the project list page:

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Foundation

18

To improve efficiencies and usability, the Action button available in the


Project Home Page is now also available in the project list. Users are no
longer required to drill down before they can execute an action against a
selected project.

To provide easier access to commonly used reporting values, Quarter to Date


and Year to Date values are now available as attributes displayed in the list.

3.5.3.1.2. Worklist and Notification Regions


A new Worklist and Notification region is available on the Project List page. The
new region displays worklist items and notifications assigned to the user across all
projects for which the user has an active role. Productivity is increased as users are
no longer required to drill down into individual projects to retrieve notifications and
review items that need attention.
3.5.3.1.3. Report Views Region
A new Report Views region allows users to quickly access commonly used reports
and queries. Users first create and save the reports using the Alternative Search page.
All saved reports are then available for reuse and can be retrieved directly from the
project list page. This feature not only provides quicker access to data but also saves
time by allowing users to save queries rather than redefining them each time they
need to view the results.
3.5.3.1.4. Bookmarks Region
A new Bookmark region allows users to streamline retrieval of project-related items
they commonly need to access. Once users select an item to bookmark, the item
appears in the bookmark list until the user removes it. The list of bookmarks is
specific to each user based on the items they choose to bookmark. The bookmark
region is not available on all pages.
3.5.3.2. Streamlined Searches
The following enhancements were designed to streamline project searches:

Simple and Advanced Search results are now displayed in the main region of the
project list page. This allows users to view the results of their queries and still have
access to other information and links provided on the page.

New criteria values such as Contains and Greater Than, Less Than along with
new filter attributes enhance the users ability to create personalized views.

3.5.3.3. New Hover Pop Up Windows


An exciting new feature, called hover pop-up windows, allow users to obtain additional
information simply by hovering their cursor over selected fields on the Project List, Edit
Budget and Edit Forecast pages. A small window will pop up on the screen providing
additional information that was previously only available via drill downs.

3.5.4.

Release 12.1.3
3.5.4.1. Enhanced Project List Page
In this release we continue to build on past enhancements to the Project List page by
making the page more informative, streamline access to common functions and make the
page configurable. The enhancements are:

The project list page includes a report region which was introduced in 12.1.2.
With this release we are further improving the usability of this feature by
allowing users to delete report views that they have created and to know the

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Foundation

19

criteria and format that went into the creation of a report. The benefits of
these enhancements will allow users to have better visibility into their reports
and be able to manage the volume of reports over time.

In Alternate Search page, the user can select and save the combination of
search criteria and report format as a report and then run the report from
Project List page.

Easily navigate between project list, simple search, advanced search and
alternate search.

3.5.4.2. Enhanced Diagnostics


We have improved our diagnostics collection scripts in this release around Project
Management, Project Performance Reporting, Project Billing and Project Resource
Management.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Foundation

20

3.6.

Oracle Project Management


3.6.1.

Overview
Oracle Project Management provides project managers the visibility and control they
need to deliver their projects successfully. With Oracle Project Management, all elements
of the project lifecycle are integrated and stored in one repository, enabling project
managers to operate more efficiently.
Oracle Project Management is an integrated part of Oracle Projects, a comprehensive set
of solutions that can help you predictably and successfully deliver global projects by
integrating, managing and providing insight into enterprise project information.

3.6.2.

Release 12.1.1
3.6.2.1. New Audit Process for Project Performance Reporting Setup
Oracle Projects now includes a new concurrent audit process, AUD: Project Performance
Reporting Setup. You can run this process to generate a report that enables you to review
setup information for Oracle Projects project performance reporting features. This
capability enables you to quickly determine if all mandatory and optional setup
parameters are defined correctly. The increased visibility that this report provides helps
you to ensure that your project performance reporting summarization processes function
correctly and do not generate reporting errors because of improper or incomplete setup.
3.6.2.2. New Parameters for Refresh Project Performance Data Process
The process PRC: Refresh Project Performance Data enables you to refresh all actual
and plan amount data for a group of projects. Depending on factors such as the number of
projects that you specify and the number of workplan and financial plan versions that
exist on each project, the refresh process can take substantial time to complete. To help
minimize processing time and provide you with greater flexibility in selecting the actual
and plan amount data you want to refresh, this process now includes additional selection
parameters. You can now choose whether to refresh only actual amounts or all amounts
(plan and actual). In addition, you can optionally select the workplan and financial plan
versions that you want to refresh.
3.6.2.3. Workplan Enhancements
This release provides several enhancements for Oracle Projects workplan functionality.
3.6.2.3.1. Ability to Delete Published Workplan Versions
You can now delete published workplan versions. You can delete all published
workplan versions except the latest published version, baseline version, and workplan
versions included in a program hierarchy.
3.6.2.3.2. Usability Enhancements
The following enhancements streamline the flows for accessing and maintaining
workplans:

With this release, you can now view, maintain, and update a workplan
structure from the Update Tasks page. The Update Work Breakdown
Structure page is now obsolete.

During setup and maintenance of workplan tasks, Oracle Projects now enables
you to indent or outdent multiple workplan tasks in a single step.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

21

In the absence of a latest published workplan version, Oracle Projects now


displays the current working version on the Update Tasks page when you
navigate to the Workplan Tasks subtab.

Oracle Projects now displays additional confirmation, information, and


warning messages on user interface pages during system processing for the
Apply Latest Progress action as well as the Submit (progress) action. These
messages provide you with status information during processing and advise
you about the availability of the latest progress information.

3.6.2.3.3. New Public API for Creating, Maintaining, and Deleting Programs
With this release, Oracle Projects is introducing a new set of public API procedures
that perform the following tasks:

Designate a project as a program and indicate whether projects linked to the


program can belong to multiple programs.

Create links from a program to one or more projects

Update links from a program to one or more projects

Delete links from a program to one or more projects

THIS FEATURE WAS ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 11.5.10 FP.M RUP3


3.6.2.4. Budgeting and Forecasting Enhancements
This release provides several enhancements for Oracle Projects budgeting and forecasting
functionality.
3.6.2.4.1. Enhanced Automatic Calculation and Derivation Logic
In Family Pack M, Oracle Projects introduced new features that enabled you to
automatically calculate and derive quantities and amounts for budgets and forecasts.
The new features included predefined logic that controlled the calculation and
derivation of budget and forecast quantities, rates, and amounts. This release includes
the following enhancements to the predefined calculation and derivation logic:

You can now track cost and revenue amounts only, or revenue amounts only
(without quantities and rates) in your budgets and forecasts. When you enter
an amount for a plan line and do not specify a quantity, Oracle Projects no
longer automatically copies the amount to the quantity field and sets the rate
value to 1.

Rate now has a lower precedence than quantity and amount in calculations.
For example, if you enter quantity, rate, and amount for a plan line at the same
time, then Oracle Projects holds the quantity and amount constant and rederives the rate.

If you indirectly override the burden multiplier for a plan line by updating one
of the plan line component amounts that are used to derive burdened cost (for
example, the raw cost or burden cost rate), then Oracle Projects uses the
override burden multiplier in subsequent calculations of burdened cost that are
caused by changes to the raw cost. Similarly, if you indirectly override a
markup percent by updating a plan line component amount that is used to
derive the revenue amount, then Oracle Projects uses the override markup
percent in subsequent revenue calculations.

3.6.2.4.2. Enhanced Handling of Override Rates on Budget / Forecast Lines

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

22

With this release, you can directly enter override rates for a planning transaction on
Edit Budget and Edit Forecast pages. In addition, the average rates fields on these
pages are now disabled for entry and are used for display only.
A planning transaction is a budget or forecast line that is identified by a combination
of project and task, planning resource, and transaction currency. The override rates
that you enter on Edit Budget and Edit Forecast pages are retained with the planning
transaction for as long as the planning transaction is retained.
You can enter override rates for raw cost rate, burdened cost rate, and bill rate. When
you enter override rates for a planning transaction, Oracle Projects automatically
applies the override rates to all existing periodic lines and to any new periodic lines
that you subsequently add.
3.6.2.4.3. Simplified Addition of Planning Elements and Resources
You can now add all new, but unbudgeted tasks and resources to a budget or forecast
version. New options are available on the Planning Elements: Select Tasks page to
add either all new tasks and planning resources or new tasks only to the current plan
version.
THIS FEATURE WAS ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 11.5.10 FP.M RUP3
3.6.2.5. Self Service Expenditure Inquiry
Customers have had the ability in the Forms application to inquire on their expenditures
but did not have the same access in the self service application. With this release we now
offer the ability to drill into expenditure details from the Financials tab.
3.6.2.6. Reporting Pack for Generation and Distribution of XML Publisher Reports
The ability to monitor project performance without accessing the application and archive
the reports you receive for future reference is the key business driver for the reporting
pack.
A reporting pack consists of a set of report templates and named recipients by project
role. The Generate Reporting Pack concurrent program uses the report templates to
generate reports and distribute these reports to the recipients via e-mail. Your system
administrator defines the intervals for the generation and distribution of the reports.
The report template controls the content and layout of each report. Using XML Publisher
tools, your system administrator can create new report templates to configure the content
and output to meet your business needs. Any new or modified report can be added to an
existing reporting pack or used to create an entirely new report set.
Oracle Projects provides a predefined data definition file that contains XML tags for
performance measures and project data. In addition, Oracle Projects provides the
following predefined reports:

Project Change Document Report - displays all change orders for a project that
are not in cancelled or closed status. The change orders are grouped by type such
as customer initiated or internal. The report displays the impact of the change
orders on budget amounts for the period, quarter, year, and since project
inception.

Project Committed Cost Report - displays purchase orders, purchase


requisitions, and supplier invoices by vendors since inception of the project.
Commitments can be grouped by vendor, commitment status, or vendor and
commitment status.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

23

Project Cost Detail Report - displays cost transactions by expenditure type,


expenditure type class, and tasks for a specified range of dates.

Project Cost Labor Report - displays labor information for employees and
contingent workers. Data includes planned and actual hours as well as cost and
cost per hour for a range of periods. Cost can be grouped by task and person type,
or task and project roles/employees, or by job and expenditure type.

Project Cost Summary Report - displays information on budgets, actual costs,


cost to complete, and forecasted cost at completion, as well as variances between
budget and actual cost amounts. Cost can be grouped by period, top tasks,
expenditure categories, or by top tasks and expenditure categories. The report
displays period-to-date and inception-to-date information which can be used to
analyze cost trends.

Project Earned Value Report - displays data and trends for key earned value
metrics by tasks, and also aggregated for the project as a whole. The metrics are
based on ANSI 748 standards and earned value calculation is performed on data
that is available since the inception of the project.

Project Financial Summary Report - displays budgets, receivables, open


commitments, collections and earned value data.

Project Forecast Summary Report - displays detailed time-phased actual and


forecast amounts for revenue and cost grouped by tasks. You can use this report
to analyze forecasted, budgeted, and actual cost, revenue and margin trends.

Project Revenue At Risk Report - displays revenue that is at risk because of


insufficient funding. Insufficient funding may occur as a result of delay in
securing contracts or due to a continuation of work beyond the expiration of the
contract or beyond the contract billing limits.

3.6.2.7. Budget Integration with Federal Budget Execution and/or 3rd Party Budget
The budget integration workflow now supports integration with the Federal Budget
Execution module also known as FedAdmin. In addition the workflow can be
customized to interface budget lines to external budgeting applications.
3.6.2.8. Microsoft Project 2007 Certification
Many of our customers are upgrading their copies of Microsoft Project now that the 2007
version is available. Others plan to upgrade in the coming year.
Oracle Project Management now supports integration with Microsoft Project 2007. This
will allow our customers to continue using the convenient, out-of-the-box integration
with Microsoft Project to handle all of their scheduling needs.
3.6.2.9. Project Performance Reporting: Additional Measures
Year to Date, Quarter to Date and At Completion calculated measures, previously
available within Project Status Inquiry are now available on the following pages:
Performance Overview

Period-to-Date
Summary/Analysis

Task Summary/Analysis Resource Summary/Analysis


YTD, QTD and At Completion figures are sometimes used by customers who fund
projects on an annual basis. Project managers leverage this metric to determine the
performance of their actuals against plans. The YTD metric also highlights a projects
burn rate and can be an early indicator which if monitored and acted upon reduces
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

24

downstream budgeting issues. Lastly, this metric is also widely used within government
agencies and is expected to be visible on many standard government reports.
3.6.2.10. Project Performance Reporting: Inter-Project Revenue / Billing Amounts
Inter project revenue / billing amounts previously available within Project Status Inquiry
are now available on the following pages:
Project List
View Workplan Cost
Exception Reporting
Performance Overview
Task Summary/Analysis
Resource Summary/Analysis
Period-to-Date Summary/Analysis
3.6.2.11. Supplier Cost Dashboard
Release 12.1.1 provides a new dashboard for viewing and monitoring the status of
supplier invoices for a given project. Seeded views allow the user to view all invoices for
a project or all outstanding invoices for the project. Search options are also available to
allow the user to select invoices of interest.
3.6.2.12. Subcontractor Payment Controls
Release 12.1.1 provides new capabilities to support the management and control of
subcontractor payments in Engineering & Construction companies. New capabilities
within Oracle Projects, Oracle Procurement and Oracle Financials allow the end-to-end
management of the following common construction industry scenarios:
3.6.2.12.1. Support for Pay when Paid Scenarios
Many construction firms adhere to a Pay when Paid policy for subcontract
agreements, in order to manage cash flow for a project. Specifically, construction
companies will hold the payment of subcontractor bills until the construction firm has
been paid by the owner.
With Release 12.1.1 a new Pay when Paid payment term may be specified for a
subcontract to automatically result in the placing of holds on all subcontractor
invoices under that subcontract, until the corresponding customer payment is
received.
A new Subcontract Payment Controls workbench allows the project manager to
manage these holds, with visibility into both the customer invoices and the associated
subcontractor invoices. Alerted by workflow notifications once the customer
payment is received, the project manager can then choose to automatically or
manually release the corresponding subcontractor invoices. The associations
between the customer invoices and the subcontractor invoices may be automatically
maintained based on the billing of project expenditures in the case of a cost-plus
contract, or may be manually maintained for fixed price contract scenarios.
3.6.2.12.2. Payment Controls for Subcontract Deliverables
Release 12.1.1 also provides support for the tracking and monitoring of subcontract
deliverables that place automatic holds on subcontractor invoices in the case of noncompliance. Enhancements to Oracle Procurement Contracts allow a subcontract
administrator for a construction project to optionally specify payment impact controls
that will take effect when a particular subcontract deliverable is not met. For
example, if a subcontractor fails to provide their insurance certificate in a timely
fashion per the subcontract terms, holds will be automatically placed on their
incoming invoices based on the contractual dates of the deliverable. These holds

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

25

will also be automatically released once the subcontract deliverable compliance is


reinstated.
From the Subcontractor Payment Controls workbench, the project manager can view
a checklist of the all the current subcontract deliverables, to assist in evaluating the
subcontractor status prior to releasing monthly progress payments.

3.6.3.

Release 12.1.2
3.6.3.1. Reporting Performance Improvements
With Release 12.1.2, project users will greatly benefit from a dedicated effort to improve the
overall performance of the Project Performance Reporting feature.
Enhancements include:

New configuration options allow users to control the data volume generated by the
summarization processes. The options provide the ability to turn off summarization
for unused currencies and calendars.

A new concurrent process allows users to purge old financial and workplan versions
that are no longer needed. This again reduces the volume of data to be summarized.

To help improve the performance of the PRC: Update Project Performance Data
(UPPD) process, a new concurrent program, PRC: Launch Update Project
Performance has been introduced. This new concurrent program divides and groups
the projects into manageable batches. It sends the batch name as a parameter to the
UPPD process and launches the process automatically for each batch. The UPPD
process will process the project performance data for only those projects that are part
of the batch. The UPPD process can still be run as before, but when launched by the
new program, UPPD processes the daily load of projects more efficiently.

A new client extension works in conjunction with the new launch process described
able to allow customers to select projects for processing. This gives system
administrators more control to schedule project updates in accordance with business
needs and priorities.

Technical changes were made to improve load balancing and increase the degree of
parallelism.

3.6.3.2. MSP Integration Enhancements


In Release 12.1.2 there are several enhancements to improve the stability and extend the
coverage of integration with Microsoft Projects.
3.6.3.2.1. Download Baseline Cost
The original baseline cost for a project and the latest published cost can now be sent
to MSP in separate fields. This will give users insight into how planned costs are
changing over the life of the project and provide greater visibility into performance.
3.6.3.2.2. Download Period to Date/Year to Date Cost
Government entities and other companies require that Period to Date and Year to
Date cost values be shown in MSP. Therefore this data has been added to the
interface. Both raw cost and burdened cost amounts are supported.
3.6.3.3. Enhanced Change Management
With this release, significant work has been done to improve the usability and enhance
change control features specifically targeted for the Engineering and Construction
industry.
3.6.3.3.1. Streamlined Control Item Definition
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

26

Various control item types can be created to track different types of issues and
changes. For each control item type users select regions of data to be included on
future issue and change documents. With this release, new regions are available to
streamline data entry. By combining the right regions, organizations can ensure that
pertinent data is captured for each document created.
3.6.3.3.2. New Supplier Impact Region
A new supplier region provides improved planning and control for changes that
impact subcontracted work. New cost fields (estimated, quoted, negotiated and final)
are available in the supplier region to track negotiations with the subcontractors. An
audit log maintained as the cost fields are updated can be used to track how
negotiations are progressing and to identify problems that could lead to cost overruns
or schedule delays.
3.6.3.3.3. Document Versioning
Change documents, particularly ones with high impact, can go through many
iterations of review before final estimates are accepted and approved. In order to
track this review process, all change documents now support versioning. At any
given point in time, users can take a snapshot of the entire document. When a
snapshot is taken, a new document version is created to track future updates.
3.6.3.3.4. Potential Change Order Report for Customer Approval
When a change request requires external approval, a new XML Publisher report can
be generated and faxed or emailed to the reviewing parties. A new feature allows
users to lock the change document in order to prevent updates while the document is
in a pending approval state. To support review and approval history tracking, a
potential change order report can be generated and attached to each version of the
change request document. An automatic numbering feature can be used to track the
number of change documents presented to the customer.
3.6.3.3.5. Task Creation to Track Change Order Work and Costs
Frequently organizations wish to track work and costs related to a change order
separately from work performed under the original contract. Work for the change
order may be subject to different billing terms and conditions or the organization may
have internal reasons for segregating the costs. If the work for example is the result
of on-site damages caused by subcontractor negligence, the organization may wish to
recoup the costs from the subcontractor (see below: 3.3.2.5. Deductions to
Subcontractor Invoices).
To better support this business practice, users can now create or initiate the creation
of new tasks directly from the change order document. If the person creating the
change document also has authority to create new tasks, both operations can be
completed at the same time. If the person creating the change document does not
have authority to create new tasks, then the new task is submitted for approval.
While the task is pending approval, it can be used in impact regions of the change
document but the change document cannot be approved until the task has been
approved.
3.6.3.3.6. New Search Capabilities
Large projects can have a high number of change documents. In order to support
quick retrieval for review, edit or approval, new search criteria is provided to query
by supplier or document status.
3.6.3.4. Project Manager Dashboard for Maintenance of Procurement Deliverables
A new feature in Release 12.1.1 provided support for the tracking and monitoring of
subcontract deliverables that place automatic holds on subcontractor invoices in the case
Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

27

of non-compliance. For example, if a subcontractor fails to provide their insurance


certificate in a timely fashion per the subcontract terms, holds are automatically placed on
incoming invoices based on the contractual dates of the deliverable. The holds are
automatically released once the subcontract deliverable compliance is reinstated.
Also in 12.1.1, a new Payment Controls workbench in Oracle Projects allows the project
manager to view a checklist of all subcontract deliverables to assist in evaluating the
subcontractor status prior to releasing monthly progress payments.
As project managers are frequently responsible for subcontractor management, in 12.1.2,
the Payment Controls workbench has been enhanced to allow project managers to
directly update subcontract deliverables. A project manager with proper security
privileges can update existing deliverables or define new deliverables to track future
subcontractor obligations.
3.6.3.5. Improved Supplier Invoice Payment Controls
The Payment Controls workbench introduced in Release 12.1.1 also gave project
managers the ability to review supplier invoices and manually release pay when paid and
deliverable payment holds at their discretion regardless of whether the deliverable has
been fulfilled or whether the customer has paid for the subcontracted work.
The workbench has now been enhanced to give project managers the ability to place any
invoice on hold at their discretion. This gives project managers more control over when
and how much each subcontractor is being paid each period. This helps project managers
ensure the quality of subcontractor work and also helps them manage cash flow.
3.6.3.6. Deductions to Subcontractor Invoices
Frequently, general contractors need to recoup costs from subcontractors. The general
contractor may have provided fuel to the subcontractor at the work site or the general
contractor may have paid for the subcontractors license to operate in a new state. With
less frequency, the general contractor may need to recoup costs for damages caused by
the subcontractor.
To automate the recoupment process, Oracle Projects has introduced deduction
functionality. A deduction can be manually entered, uploaded via an application
programming interface (API) or created by selecting expenditure items for the
expenditure item inquiry window. When a deduction is approved, it is interfaced to
Oracle Payables as a debit memo. To recoup payment, the debit memo is applied to
future invoices submitted by the subcontractor.
3.6.3.7. Project Security within Oracle Purchasing
It is common in project-centric industries like Engineering and Construction for buyers to
be assigned to projects rather than to commodities or item categories. Buyers only have
authority to transact on behalf of the projects to which they are assigned. To help enforce
this business rule, project level security is being introduced in Oracle Purchasing. When
the new security option is enabled, procurement users will only be allowed to view and
update procurement documents that are related to a project on which the user has an
active role.
3.6.3.8. Planning by Fiscal Calendars
Many government contractors and entities use fiscal GL calendars that recognize the
standard 5-4-4 calendar which consists of 5 weeks, 4 weeks and 4 weeks per quarter.
Prior to this enhancement the Even spread curve option recognized each month as the
first to the last day and therefore did not accommodate the 5-4-4 fiscal calendar. As a
result, the forecasted hours for a resource were not properly distributed across the time
phased plan.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

28

To alleviate this problem, a new option, Fiscal Calendar, has been added in addition to
Curve for spreading amounts across planning periods. This will allow users to more
accurately represent time phased plans without requiring manual entry of override
amounts.
3.6.3.9. Planning by Manual Entry
Government contractors are required to forecast remaining work as accurately as possible
to aid comparisons and adherence to submitted plans. Frequently manual entry of time
phased planning amounts is the only way to accurately reflect the intended work patterns
of resources. This is why PMBOK notes non-derived, i.e. manual, entry of estimate to
complete (ETC) values as a standard requirement.
Prior to this enhancement, forecasting required the use of a spread curve and during
forecast generation manually entered planning amounts were overridden. With this
release, a new Copy ETC from Plan checkbox allows users to bypass the use of spread
curves when forecasting cost. When the new option is enabled, all time phased values
entered on the workplan are honored.
3.6.3.10. Spread Curve Updates via Task Assignment API
Users frequently need to change the Spread Curve associated with a resource assignment.
Prior to this enhancement the user was required to navigate to each task and manually
update each assignment. To aid automation, the Update Task Assignment API has been
enhanced to support updates to the Spread Curve value. This provides users with the
flexibility to develop mass update capabilities and eliminate time consuming manual
entry.
3.6.3.11. Default Option to Allow Assignment Same As Task Duration
To simplify the interface of project assignments, the Assignment Same as Task
Duration flag can now be enabled at the project level. When most resource assignments
share the same duration as the task, users can now enable the project flag rather than
being required to update the flag for each individual task.

3.6.4.

Release 12.1.3
3.6.4.1. Reporting Performance Improvements
With Release 12.1.3, project users will greatly benefit from improved performance of the
Project Performance Reporting feature.
The enhancements include a new parameter that has been added to the Launch Update
Project Performance Data and the Update Project Performance Data concurrent programs
to filter on project status. Customers will be able to choose a specific project status from
an LOV before running the program. This will improve the performance of the programs
by allowing customers to streamline the processing.
3.6.4.2. MSP Integration Enhancements
In Release 12.1.3 there was a couple of significant enhancement to fully extend the
coverage of integration with Microsoft Projects.
3.6.4.2.1. Support for Non-Shared Task Based Mapping structures
The Non-Shared Task Based Mapping option enables you to map individual
workplan structure tasks to individual financial structure tasks. This gives you the
greatest flexibility in sharing information between your structures.
Prior to release 12.1.3 customers on our R12 version could not fully integrate with
Microsoft Projects if they had chosen to use the Non-Shared Task Based mapping
between the workplan and the financial plan.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

29

3.6.4.2.2. Support for Partially Shared structure


Partially Shared structure mapping enables you to map workplan and financial
structures up to a particular point for your projects, which is useful for example when
you dont want all of your workplan details in your financial plans.
Prior to release 12.1.3 customers on our R12 version could not fully integrate with
Microsoft Projects if they chose to use the Partially Shared structure option. All
structure options are now fully supported in Release 12.1.3 and 11i.
3.6.4.3. Enhanced Change Management
With this release, the change control features in Oracle Projects have been enhanced to
meet specific business needs for the industries that typically use this functionality.
3.6.4.3.1. Enhanced Cost & Revenue Planning for Change Documents
You can use a project change document to plan for estimated changes in your direct
costs or supplier costs, providing enhanced support for the cost issue planning
process. This feature provides project managers improved control over project costs
resulting from changes.
Revenue impacts for the cost issue are automatically calculated based on estimated
cost changes for cost-based revenue plans, or may be entered manually for projects
with separate cost and revenue plans. Users can then view the impact to the project
budget, which is automatically generated from the estimated cost and revenue
changes. You can then consolidate the planned changes in cost and revenue from
multiple change requests into a single change order, to view, approve and implement
the budget impacts.
3.6.4.4. Enhanced Retention Invoice Processing for Outstanding Project
Deductions
With this release, the handling of retention invoices has been enhanced to take into
consideration any outstanding project deductions. When validating retention invoices in
Oracle Payables, a check will be made to verify that all project deductions have been
processed. Outstanding project deductions may indicate that there are pending back
charges or other miscellaneous costs that need to be recovered from your suppliers, and
which need to be taken into account before the retention is released. If there are any
unprocessed or unapproved deductions in Oracle Projects, the retention invoice will be
placed on hold, until the deductions are processed. This payment hold may also be
manually released from the supplier payment control workbench.

3.6.5.

Release 12.2
3.6.5.1. Planning with HR Rates
When labor costing is performed using rates defined in HR, an option is available to
enable the same rates for planning purposes. This ensures that planned amounts on the
work plan and financial plans accurately reflect the anticipated actual cost. See above:
3.3.3.1.1. Costing with HR Rates with Support for Multiple Rates per Employee
3.6.5.2. Updated Rates when Generating Forecast from the Workplan
When rate-based resources are assigned to the workplan, plan amounts are calculated by
multiplying the planned quantity by the resource rate derived from the planning rate
schedule. Prior to this release, when rate schedules were updated with new rates after
resource assignments were made, users had to manually select the refresh rate option
after generating new forecasts to update planned amounts based on the updated rates.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

30

The forecast process will now automatically refresh rates when you generate the forecast
using the workplan as the source.
3.6.5.3. Planning without Resource Classes
In Release 12.2, you now have the ability to plan resources without assigning them to one
of the fixed resource classes of People, Equipment, Material Items and Financial
Element. Disabling planning by resource classes allows you to plan at a higher level.
For example, you can plan by task and expenditure category and actual cost amounts
from any source such as employee labor transactions from Oracle Time and contingent
worker labor transactions from Oracle Payables can roll up to the same plan line.
3.6.5.4. Planning by Cost Breakdown Structure
Planning by cost breakdown provides new, standardized, user-defined cost classification
structure, modified project setup to enable cost breakdown planning, and enhanced
planning and cost collection by cost code. These features enhance project control that
enables you to use standard cost classification codes for planning, tracking and reporting
project costs designed to help you reduce the size, complexity and maintenance effort of
workplans and financial plans. Enhanced cost planning empowers your ability to control
projects by providing the right cost descriptions for billing, benchmarking and estimating.
You can define as many standardized cost classification structures, or cost breakdown
structures (CBS), as you need for each business unit. You define a cost breakdown
structure using standard look ups that you populate with the cost attributes you need for
classifying costs. Then you assign cost attributes to each cost classification segment
specified in your cost code structure (e.g., locations, organizations, disciplines). By
linking cost attributes in lower level segments to attributes in higher level segments, you
form a breakdown structure that helps you to track, control or report project costs by cost
codes. Modified project setups allow you to associate a single, active CBS to each
enabled project, and use the code structures within the CBS to plan your cost budgets and
generate forecasts. Only new projects can be enabled for CBS planning and once you
plan a budget or generate a forecast with actuals, you cannot change the associated CBS
for any project.
To insure that only the approved cost codes are available for planning and for charging
costs to a task, you define the cost codes that can be used for any task in the Task Setup
page. Only codes associated to the task can be used for creating workplan or financial
plan task assignments and for charging when creating project-costed transactions in
source modules (e.g., OTL, PO, and AP). Codes at any level/node of the CBS can be
assigned and you can use available options to copy sets of codes from other tasks. For
shared or split structures, codes for WBS are copied to FBS and you can add additional
codes to the FBS. While you can use cost breakdown planning with any project structure
type, such as fully-shared or partially-shared, you cannot use it with budgets that are
integrated with the General Ledger or when you enable supply chain project costing.
Enhanced cost collection by cost code means you select both a task and cost code, based
on defined associations, during time card entry in Oracle Time and Labor, while entering
project cost distributions on purchase orders in Procurement and invoices in Payables, or
when entering expense reports in iExpenses that are charged to a project. Enhanced
search functionality in each module enables full or partial value searches on task number
or task name including partial values for cost codes attributes. You can also enter preapproved batches by defining the task and cost code combination to assign to each
imported transaction. The task and cost code values are used to match the expenditures to
the project plans for reporting actuals. You can view the cost code number and
description on each expenditure item.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

31

When you view your workplans, budgets and forecasts, the hierarchy you define as CBS
cost code segments is used to summarize plan values based on your defined cost
attributes. New viewing options provide an overall plan summary by cost codes and as
well as a cost code summary for a specific task.

3.6.6.

Release 12.2.4
3.6.6.1. Usability: Project Creation and Control Enhancements
3.6.6.1.1. Enhanced Options when Creating New Projects
When creating a new project, users can copy values from a template or from an
existing project using a single page instead of multiple pages. This simplifies
navigation and enables users to view the values for options to be copied. Users are
also able to copy additional options from the template or source project after the
initial project is created. These additional options include Team Members,
Attachments, User-Define Attributes, and Transaction Controls.
3.6.6.1.2. Improved Budgeting and Forecasting Page Navigation
New navigation options on financial plan editing pages make updates to budgets and
forecasts easier and more efficient. Users can use arrow keys to navigate across rows
and columns, adjust column widths, freeze rows and columns, hide and show
columns and sort columns of the financial plan tables easily. Column alignment,
currency precision and definable number of rows are also displayed to make table
values easier to read.
3.6.6.1.3. Workplan and Financial Plan Summary
A new reporting page displays earned value measures in a single report view. The
report is available for all fully shared structure projects and integrates work plan and
financial plan information to calculate new measures.
3.6.6.2. Update Financial Attributes

3.6.6.3. Move Tasks across Top Tasks


Users can move tasks across top tasks in the work breakdown structure (WBS). This
provides the flexibility to change the WBS task structure after creating the project.
Key accounting and business rules are validated to ensure the data is consistent and
to prevent errors.

3.6.7.

Release 12.2.5
3.6.7.1. Cost Breakdown Structure for Intercompany and Interproject Billing
Projects
Interproject and intercompany billing projects can now be enabled for cost breakdown
structure planning. Enabling CBS for interproject and intercompany projects provides a
standard cost classification code mechanism for planning, tracking and reporting project
costs across your organization.
3.6.7.2. PPR Refactoring
For very large and complex projects, the size of the data sets required to report and track
project performance can be extremely large and require complex processing to
summarize data on the required dimensions, including dates, task structures, currencies,
program structures. The project performance reporting (PPR) feature in Oracle Project
Planning and Control includes several enhanced programs and program stages that must
be executed and finish successfully to prepare the required project performance data.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

32

With the enhanced project performance reporting, core data processing now relies on indatabase features (OLAP Cubes) to streamline the programs and phases. New
reconciliation reports will insure you have the information about each processing stage
that ensures the project data is reliable.
In addition, use of the programs or program stages is no longer required to view data for
specific plans. The views of plan data are derived directly from the transactional data and
have been improved and simplified to make it more performant and still provide the
required visibility of summarized data for project performance tracking and monitoring.
With improved project performance reporting data processing your data will be more
reliable, easier to reconcile and you can spend less time preparing data for performance
reporting.
3.6.7.3. Plan, Execute, Monitor & Control Unit Rate Based Projects
To effectively manage profitability for complex unit rate based contracts, project
management teams require the ability to 1) measure progress based on the delivery units
that generate revenue, and 2) monitor earned value against expenditures and costs to
control internal efficiency. The project management team can plan, execute, monitor and
control unit-rate based contract projects for greater profitability using Schedule of Values
(SOV) and Activity Resource Requirement (ARR).
For unit rate based contracts, payments are based on the product of units delivered at a
unit price. SOV quantify the value of contractual project delivery lines that yield the
overall cost, scope, schedule and quality (CSSQ). Project managers use SOV to measure
and manage progress based on the delivery units that drive billing. Using of SOV avoids
multiple structures to provide a single source of truth for all aspects of the project Work
plan, Revenue Budget, Cost Budget Progress and Billing. SOV aligns these project
entities to drive efficient project monitoring and control towards excellence.
Activity Resource Requirement (ARR) defines the resources required to complete tasks
and how the related expenditures are allocated to the delivery lines that generate revenue.
This enables project managers to monitor earned value against expenditures and costs to
control internal efficiency.
3.6.7.4. Budgetary Controls for Financial Plans
Project Managers use financial plans to plan and manage the financial performance of
their projects throughout the project life cycle. As various costs (requisitions, purchase
orders, and supplier invoices) are coming into the project, project managers need the
ability to verify funds for these types of transactions. For budgetary control purposes,
and real time control of project costs, the purchase to pay transactions must be checked
against the project budget in order to ensure adequate funding is available. For example,
funds to approve a purchase order would need to be checked against the project budget
financial plan as part of the purchase order approval process.
The Budgetary Control integration available for use with budgets in Project Costing has
now been extended for use with financial plans in Project Management. Project
managers now have the visibility to limit commitments and actual expenses within the
projects approved cost budget, view the actual and commitment funds check results, and
monitor the failed transactions in order to take corrective action. For both top down and
bottom up GL Budget Integrations, project managers can view drill down to the budget
accounting details for each transaction.
Budgetary Control for financial plans provides product managers real time control at both
the project and task level over the following types of expenses:

Project-related purchase requisitions and purchase orders entered in Oracle


Purchasing

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

33

Project- related supplier invoices entered in Oracle Payables, whether


matched to a purchase orders or not.

Project-related prepayments not matched to a purchase order and the


application of unmatched prepayments to supplier invoices

Receipt of goods against purchase orders specified to Accrue on Receipt

Expenditure Items created in Oracle Projects from supplier invoices or


receipt of goods

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Management

34

3.7.

Oracle Project Contracts


3.7.1.

Overview
Oracle Project Contracts supports the contract management needs of project driven
organizations, including commercial and government contractors, agencies, and
subcontractors. These organizations operate in a project centric environment
characterized by:

Changing contract specifications.


Volatile demand and long lead-times.
High percentage of procure-to-contract components and services.
Contractual requirements for billing.
Incremental funding in multiple currencies.
Compliance of government regulations.

Oracle Project Contracts addresses budgetary constraints, contract margins, flow down of
contract information to subcontractors, and prioritization of deliverables. The Contract
Organizer window provides a single entry point to access and define contract documents.
Through the Contract Organizer window, you can access different functional regions
including authoring, deliverable tracking, funding, hold management, contract revisions,
and other contract related activities.

3.7.2.

Release 12.1.3+
3.7.2.1. Copy Status when Creating a Contract from Template
Oracle Project Contracts now allows users to copy the status specified on a Template
while creating a new contract from it. System provides the user with an option to achieve
this.
3.7.2.2. User Attributes Validation
Oracle Project Contracts now provides the capability for one to explicitly check the
existence of values for all mandatory User Attributes and validity of values provided for
all User Attributes. This validation is carried out across the entire contract document.
3.7.2.3. Provide Contract Access to Contingent Workers
Prior to this release, contingent workers were not provided direct access to contracts
within the application. Hence, organizations had to use workarounds in order to
effectively utilize their contingent work force, such as using regular employees access
information. This posed as a big security threat for the project based organizations.
Contingent workers can now be provided access to the contracts through the use of a
profile option OKE: Allow Contingent Workers. If this profile is set to Yes,
organizations would be able to provide contract access to the contingent workers.
3.7.2.4. Project Contracts Public APIs
Oracle Project Contracts now offers a wide range of public APIs to carry out Create,
Update and Delete operations at various levels in the entire contract document, in
addition to the already existing APIs. With this release, users can update and delete
contract header, lines and deliverables. The APIs now enable users to create, update and
delete billing events and user defined attributes. Users can also create and update contract
parties and roles, as well as update project status. These APIs will help in increasing the
usability of the application and productivity of the users.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Contracts

35

3.7.3.

Release 12.2.4
3.7.3.1. Federal Contract Billing
Federal contractors in the Defense and Aerospace sectors are governed by Federal
Acquisition Regulations, or FAR. Federal Contracts include the commercial terms
specifying how the contractors will receive payment, such as fixed price with progress
payments, cost plus fixed fee etc. Contractors need to generate bills and maintain the
required audit trail specified by FAR, in order to receive payments on time.
Oracle Project Contracts now allows the storage of information related to Accounting
Code Reference Numbers (ACRNs), payment instructions etc., as well as enables users to
perform fund allocations using ACRNs. This information is then interfaced to Oracle
Project Billing in order to maintain the required audit trail.
In addition to this, Oracle Project Contracts now supports the automatic fee percent
calculation as well as the ability to bill a contract using a project hierarchy. In this
release, Bill Group has been renamed to Consolidated Bill Group and provides
available data for contracts and for invoicing purposes. A consolidated bill group is
defined in Oracle Project Billing and can be used to group contract lines based on your
federal billing contract.
Federal Contract Billing uses an extension of the validation framework introduced within
Project Contracts. The validation framework, as detailed in the next section, uses a
seeded quality assurance check list and process specified for Federal Contracts, along
with the option to include additional validations related to Federal Contract Billing as
required. In addition to contract approval and modification, the validate document
action is automatically executed prior to agreement creation or funding update
completion.
3.7.3.2. Project Contracts Validation Framework
Oracle Project Contracts now provides a Validation Framework for quality assurance of
all Project Contracts by the following two key entities:

Quality Assurance Process

Quality Assurance Check List

The Quality Assurance Process includes validation rules defined by the user, while the
Quality Assurance Check List consists of either one Process or a combination of multiple
Processes as per the business requirements. Oracle Project Contracts provides a seeded
Quality Assurance Check List Default Project Contracts Quality Assurance Check
List which includes a seeded Quality Assurance Process Check User Attributes for
Project Contracts. With the help of this seeded Check List, users can easily find any
invalid values in the User Defined Attributes of a contract at both Contract Header and
Contract Line levels.
The Validation Framework provides the validation results to the user when its executed
against a Project Contract. This is initiated thru the Validate Document action in the
Authoring Workbench allowing the user to validate current contract. Besides, this
validation for quality assurance is also automatically executed before the start of the
approval of the contract and before the completion of a change request.
3.7.3.3. Schedule of Values
Projects product now support Schedules of Values (SOV), which is a part of contractual
agreement, used as the basis for delivery and payment (Billing through periodic
applications for payment), whereby the contractor requests payment against the delivery
or work completed during that period.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Contracts

36

Oracle Project Contracts now provides the capability to support Schedule of Values
correspondingly, providing related restrictions to ensure data quality. SOV can be
maintained within Oracle Project Contracts and then interfaced with Oracle Projects.
Some of the key features introduced here include:

Display of SOV type of the project associated with the current contract.

Enable Fee Retention Percent for SOV related contracts.

Validations have been added for project association, tasks selection and line
quantity changes.

Extended Validation Framework with the Seeded Quality Assurance Check List
and Processes specified for SOV related contracts, including the validation for
single customer association and inapplicable data.

SOV information will be interfaced to Projects after a contract is approved or a


change request is completed.

A Project Contract or Contract Lines can only be terminated after due checks for
their availability for termination have been made with the related Project.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Contracts

37

3.8.

Oracle Project Procurement


3.8.1.

Overview
Oracle Project Procurement enables project managers and project buyers to collaborate
and align their activities when planning, tracking and managing the acquisition of
products, materials and services needed to complete a project. Built using the power of
Endeca for EBS, the application integrates project management information from Oracle
Project Management, project cost information from Oracle Project Costing and
procurement documents, supplier and buyer information from Oracle Sourcing and
Procurement. This combined information provides key insights, metrics and access to
common actions necessary to support decisions and ensure strategic alignment of
procurement activities with the projects objectives.
Use Project Procurements project procurement plan to plan and track acquisitions
needed to complete your projects. Use specialized analysis tools to explore your plans
and your procurement history with suppliers and items and ensure selection of the best
options. With command centers for both project management and project buyer users
built on the same, integrated information, you can make decisions using up-to-date and
common measures that enhance project execution and minimize project wastage.

3.8.2.

Release 12.2.4
3.8.2.1. Enable Projects for Procurement Planning
To use Project Procurement, you enable procurement planning in the project setup page.
Once enabled, the project is displayed in the command centers and project managers can
upload new or updated procurement plans.
3.8.2.2. Create and Manage Project Procurement Plans
Once you enable a project for procurement planning, you can upload a project
procurement plan. The plan specifies the materials or services needed for a project task
and location, including a monthly schedule of the required items to insure project buyers
know how much of the item is needed, when it is required and where to have it delivered.
You can also enter a budget amount and suggest a supplier.
3.8.2.3. Project Management Command Center View
From the EBS Endeca Extension for Project Management Project Overview page, you
can access the Endeca-based project management command center. This page is specially
designed to provide integrated project and procurement information for the project
manager. From the command center, project managers can view project financial and
schedule information, determine if materials are available to start scheduled tasks, update
procurement plan line statuses, replace items for a procurement plan lines, initiate new
requisitions using the integrated shopping cart and see the status of procurement
activities, including orders and deliveries.
When the project plans need to be updated, the project manager has access to update task
dates or other information to insure the project schedule and plan information is aligned
to the procurement schedule. Managers can also access specialized Endeca-based Item
and Supplier analysis pages for researching procurement history.
3.8.2.4. Project Buyer Command Center View
The buyer command center view is specially designed to provide integrated project and
procurement information for project buyers. From the Endeca-based command center
view, buyers can view the status of procurement plan lines and initiate sourcing or

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Procurement

38

procurement activities to insure the needed materials or services are delivered in time to
meet the project schedule and meet the quality and reliability standards required. Buyers
can identify sources of supply, initiate and track negotiations with suppliers using the
integrated document builder, compare bids from suppliers and view the current state or
details of existing procurement agreements and orders.
Alerts, charts, graphs and metrics insure that from the command center, buyers can
identify and resolve procurement issues, insure a balanced workload and track the
performance of the project procurement process so that the project schedule and budget
stay on-track.
3.8.2.5. Item Analysis
Use the Item Analysis pages to explore the history of items used in your projects. Past
performance, including on-time delivery, quality and item suitability, can be evaluated or
compared to the items requested in the procurement plan to ensure the right items are
selected.
3.8.2.6. Supplier Analysis
Use the Supplier Analysis pages to explore the history of suppliers who have provided
materials or services used in your projects. Past performance, including on-time delivery,
quality or supplier capabilities, can be evaluated or compared to the items requested in
the procurement plan to ensure the best suppliers are selected.

3.8.3.

Release 12.2.5
3.8.3.1. Manage Procurement of Services
With the introduction of managing procurement services, a project procurement plan can
be uploaded for procurement of Engineered Equipment and Subcontracted Services. The
plan specifies the services needed for a project task including progress payments for the
service to insure project buyers know when the service is to be rendered by the supplier
and the possible cash outflow for the services performed. The project manager can also
link the progress payments to receipt of materials to help the buyers insure payments are
made only after receipt of linked materials. The project manager can also enter a budget
amount and suggest a supplier for these services lines.
From the Project Manager Command Center View, project managers can view the
progress payment related information for the services requested, create new requisitions
for the plan lines using the integrated shopping cart and track the status of procurement
activities including deliverables defined in the purchase order document
From the Project Buyer Command Center View, project buyers can view the progress
payment related information for the services, identify source of supply for services, create
new negotiations for the requisitions created by the project manager using the integrated
document builder, compare bids and track the status of procurement activities including
deliverables defined in the purchase order document.
Alerts in the command center insure that both buyer and project manager can identify and
resolve project and procurement issues so that the project schedule and budget stay ontrack.
Item Analysis page is used to view the history of services used in the projects. Past
performance, including on-time delivery, quality and service suitability can be evaluated
or compared to the services requested in the procurement plan to ensure the right services
are selected.
Supplier Analysis page is used to view the history of suppliers who have provided
services used in the projects. Past performance, including on-time delivery, quality or

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Procurement

39

supplier capabilities, can be evaluated or compared to the service requested in the


procurement plan to ensure the best suppliers are selected.
You can also view and assign cost breakdown codes assigned to project procurement plan
lines.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Procurement

40

3.9.

Oracle Project Resource Management


3.9.1.

Overview
Oracle Project Resource Management enables companies to manage human resource
deployment and capacity for project work. Built using Oracles proven self-service
model, Oracle Project Resource Management empowers key project stakeholders, such as
project managers, resource managers, and staffing managers, to make better use of their
single most critical asset: their people.
With this application, you can manage project resource needs; profitability and
organization utilization by locating and deploying 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.

3.9.2.

Release 12.0.3 (RUP3)


3.9.2.1.

Viewing At-Completion Amounts

This enhancement enables users to view both the Total budget amounts and At
Completion budget amounts on the Project Home page and the Project Performance
reporting pages. Users can also view the effort in the Financial region.
3.9.2.2.

Choosing Displayed Currency

Users can now select the desired calendar and currency in which to view project
information on the project list, Project Home page, and the performance tracking and
reporting pages.
3.9.2.3.

Reporting Plan Type Data in Context

Users can now view the plan type data using a new Plan Summary region in the
Budgeting and Forecasting pages. The region provides the plan type data in the context of
the page it is being viewed.

3.9.3.

Release 12.1.1
3.9.3.1. Resource Search by eMail Address
The My Resources screen (Projects: Resources > Resources) now enables users to
search through the resource pool by name, person number, email address, or
organization:

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Resource Management

41

This enhancement makes searching easier for global users accessing people in countries
such as Taiwan, China, Japan, etc. who do not maintain person information in the English
language but do record email addresses in English.
3.9.3.2. Resource Search by Person Type
For some customers, much of their resource pool includes partners and contingent
workers (subcontractors). When searching for resources to assign to requirements, these
customers may wish to first limit the search scope to their employee population and then
if no suitable match is found, to search amongst partners and contingent workers.
By providing the ability to search for resources by person type, users can quickly narrow
their search to their desired population. This provides the added benefit of maximizing
revenue by first assigning employees before resorting to outside workers.
3.9.3.3. Streamlined Navigation on Staffing Home
To allow for quick navigation to commonly accessed pages, a new link is added to
Project List on the Staffing Home for My Projects.
3.9.3.4. Cross Validation of Project and Assignment Dates
Insufficient validation of start and end dates for requirements and assignments against
respective dates for the project results in poor record keeping and inaccurate resource
availability information.
Enhancements to validate dates populated by users for requirements, assignments, and
project team roles at the time of entry will help to ensure precision and accuracy in all
associated analytics and reporting subsequently used by staffing, resource, and project
managers.
The following new validations are added in this release:

Project Resource Management now ensures that requirement start dates are equal
to or greater than the project start date and less than the project end date and that
finish dates are equal to or less than the project end date but greater than the
project start date.

Assignments cannot be added beyond the project end date.

A project team role end date cannot be beyond the project end date. If the roles
are created before the project end dates are entered, users will receive an error if
they later try to enter an end date that is earlier than the end date for existing
roles.

When project transaction dates are moved corresponding assignment dates are
validated against the new project dates. If the new project transaction dates fall
outside the dates for existing assignments, users are given an option to shift the
assignment dates or cancel the date adjustment.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Resource Management

42

3.9.3.5. Defaulting of Work Patterns From and To Dates


Some users at customer sites may enter up to 100-200 requirements per day across all
geographies and operating units. To increase productivity, work pattern from and to dates
will default from the requirement start and end dates.
3.9.3.6. Improved Exception Handling of Maintain Project Resources Process
PRC: Maintain Project Resources has been enhanced to deliver improved exception
handling and notification when it encounters errors while processing employee records.
3.9.3.7. New Public APIs for Resource Management
With this release, Oracle Projects is introducing a new set of public APIs for Oracle
Project Resource Management. These new APIs enable you to create and maintain
requirements, assignments, and candidates from an external or legacy system. The new
APIs fall into the following four categories:

Requirement Public APIs: These APIs enable you to add, update, or delete a
requirement, and to partially or fully staff an open requirement.

Assignment Public APIs: These APIs enable you to add, update, or delete an
assignment, and to submit an assignment for approval.

Candidate Public APIs: These APIs enable you to add, update, or delete a
candidate, and to add a review comment for a candidate.

Competence Public APIs: These APIs enable you to add, update, or delete
competence elements for a project role or open assignment.

THIS FEATURE WAS ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 11.5.10 FP.M RUP3


3.9.3.8. Organization Authority: Obsolete Forecast Authority
This feature removes the forecast authority functionality from the organization authority
form and also removes existing security data relating to forecast authority.
Forecast Authority was introduced to support the PJR forecasting functionality. In
Projects 11i Family Pack M the PJR forecast functionality became obsolete and was
replaced by the new HTML based forecasting functionality. The new forecasting
functionality has its own security mechanism and does not honor the old forecast
authority model.
Additionally, this change will improve the performance of security calls to organization
authority because the existing security data is being removed.

3.9.4.

Release 12.1.2
3.9.4.1. Update of Start and End Dates for Multiple Requirements
Resource Managers are often required to make updates to the requirements they manage.
Commonly updated attributes include team role, staffing priority and requirement start
and end dates. The Update Requirements page provides users with a single page to
update multiple assignments. However, prior to this release, the requirement start and
end dates could not be updated from this page. Users were required to navigate to the
Update Duration page for each requirement to update the dates. As Resource Managers
frequently manage a large number of requirements, this process was very inefficient.
Therefore, the Update Requirement page has been enhanced to support the update of
requirement dates.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Resource Management

43

3.9.4.2. Select Multiple Roll Ups in a Personalized View


Searching for resources and projects is a very common task for Resource Managers.
Therefore, a streamlined search process makes their job much easier. In the past,
personalized views could be pointed to an organization but the search results returned not
only the selected organization but also all subordinate organizations that roll up in the
hierarchy they selected.
This release of Oracle Projects has added a new search interface which allows the user to
specify which organization hierarchy they wish to search and at which level of the
hierarchy they start their search. This enhanced approach to searching for projects and
resources will greatly streamline searches and allow users to find needed information
much more quickly by only returning relevant results.
3.9.4.3. Support for Schedule Shifts while Maintaining Work Patterns
Oracle Project Resource Management offers the ability to specify particular work
patterns for resources that can change over the life of a task. For example a resource
might be assigned to a task for 5 hours the first week and then 10 hours the following
week, and finally the standard 40 hours per week for the third week. However, project
schedules often change due to unforeseen circumstances and frequently tasks are delayed.
Prior to this enhancement if shift duration is used to delay the start of a task, for example
by one week, then the work pattern was not being properly retained. In the above
example, a shift of one week due to a project delay would change the work pattern to 10
weeks, 40 weeks and 40 weeks. The planned 5 hours for the first week of the task is
dropped and 40 hours for the third week is derived from the default calendar.
With this enhancement, the work pattern is retained. In our example, regardless of when
the task starts, the resource will work 5 hours the first week, 10 hours the second week
and 40 hours the third.
3.9.4.4. Updateable Fields on Scheduled People Page
To improve productivity, the Scheduled People page has been transformed from a read
only page to an updateable page. Certain fields, including the Start Date, End Date, City,
Region and Location ID, can now be directly updated without requiring drill down to the
resource requirement or assignment. The Scheduled People page was also enhanced to
enable viewing and updating multiple project team roles and assigned resources from a
single page.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Oracle Project Resource Management

44

3.10. Advanced Project Planning and Control


3.10.1.

Release 12.1.3.4
3.10.1.1. Advanced Project Planning and Control (formerly Endeca Extensions for
Oracle Project Management)
Project Managers and their teams need clearer insight into their project status and results
to identify potential issues early so they can take proactive, corrective actions quickly.
This need is even greater for large projects with complex workplans or project structures
and numerous resources to manage. Endeca Extensions help Project Managers avoid
schedule delays by warning them of late tasks before they affect project deadlines and
budgets, and allowing them to act on tasks that are behind schedule to keep projects on
track. Endeca Extensions can help Project Managers improve their productivity by
identifying and updating required progress and schedule changes quickly, making
progress or schedule changes consistently across tasks and providing the ability to update
multiple financial plans at the same time. The extensions can also help reduce project risk
by identifying tasks with financial risk and enabling efficient investigation and update
plans to avoid financial impacts.
The extensions include new overview pages for projects, workplans, financial plans and
expenditures. The new overview pages use Endeca technology to provide flexible and
robust searching and guided navigation, intelligent information about the project status or
results such as charts and graphs and configurable table layouts to make finding
information quick and easy. New Oracle Project Management pages are seamlessly
integrated to allow you to select information from the Endeca overview pages and make
efficient updates to workplan tasks and financial plans.

3.10.2.

Release 12.2.4
3.10.2.1. Advanced Project Planning and Control (formerly Endeca Extensions for
Oracle Project Management)
Features included in release 12.1.3.4 Endeca Extension for Oracle Project Management
can be implemented on base release 12.2.2.

3.10.3.

Release 12.2.5
3.10.3.1. Advanced Project Planning and Control
The project management team is required to track, monitor and control diverse project
data generated by multiple systems throughout their organization. A big challenge for
project managers is not being able to access project performance measurements in a
single place with the appropriate tools to view and monitor project performance.
The Advanced Project Planning and Control tool provides 360o view of the project and
presents key project performance indicators in an integrated command center. Project
managers can monitor metrics to identify deviations or alerts and drill down to source
transactions to address core issues. Once core issues are identified, Project Managers can
take corrective action to resolve the issue or mitigate risk.
The Advanced Project Planning and Control tool generates key performance indicators
(KPIs) that reduce the time and effort to monitor and control the project by providing
earned value metrics, project performance indicators, and resource performance
indicators. These KPIs and associated project data is generated through a structured
process to 1) ensure commitments are delivered in accordance to plan, 2) maintain cash
flow as planned, and 3) meet project objectives to deliver customer commitments with
expected value.

Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Document

Advanced Project Planning and Control

45

You might also like