Today I received an alert about the Project Portfolio Integration Pack for Primavera P6 and E-Business Suite.
Here is the link to the Data Sheet:
http://www.oracle.com/applications/aia-pip-fin-project-mgmt-p6-ebs-data-sheet.pdf
http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/@ocompublic/documents/webcontent/039439.pdf
I am excited to see the integration scenarios we identified several year back now come true.
It looks like the solution working for both Financial and Workplan, just like the feature Oracle Projects had provided for several years with Microsoft Project. However, the integration with Primavera is more flexible. You can choose to create projects in either directions.
Also, there are bi-directional integration between project budgets.
Showing posts with label Primavera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Primavera. Show all posts
Friday, November 20, 2009
Monday, October 13, 2008
Oracle Acquires Primavera - A good analysis from Forrester Research
Ray has provided an excellent analysis on the Oracle's Primavera Acquisition.
http://blogs.forrester.com/appdev/2008/10/oracle-acquires.html
He describes the key issues that are totally aligned with my understanding:
The industry is hunger to have an integrated solutions and unfortunately no single vendor can provide a one stop shop with a prepackaged solution.
I think that a successful solution should also include a web based project analytics tool. It would be the key for an integrated enterprise project management solution. The project analytics application will consolidate the project information from various subsystems and provide a single project management dashboard that allows the deploying company can pull the project information at different stage of project lifecycle with different level of detail information that are required for different users.
http://blogs.forrester.com/appdev/2008/10/oracle-acquires.html
He describes the key issues that are totally aligned with my understanding:
- The rapid market consolidation had made it difficult for niche players like Primavera to break into enterprise sales.
- Oracle’s thin PPM offering made it difficult for the vendor to venture beyond the controller’s or cost account manager’s office.
- Field personnel who are using the Primavera or any project scheduling tool for managing their projects. Some tried to standardize the process and start building PMO.
- Cost Management or Project Cost Control group. These are not accountants. They are cost engineers who are very familiar with the cost breakdown and knowing how to estimate the costs.
- Project Accountants. They could be people assigned from the financial department working on specific projects. They may also be the one who prepare the invoices to customers.
The industry is hunger to have an integrated solutions and unfortunately no single vendor can provide a one stop shop with a prepackaged solution.
I think that a successful solution should also include a web based project analytics tool. It would be the key for an integrated enterprise project management solution. The project analytics application will consolidate the project information from various subsystems and provide a single project management dashboard that allows the deploying company can pull the project information at different stage of project lifecycle with different level of detail information that are required for different users.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Oracle Buys Primavera
Primavera is a leading project management tool. Today Oracle announced that it acquires Primavera.
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/017594_EN.doc
Primavera has a very popular project scheduling software. Primavera purchase gives Oracle a very good position to the industries like engineering and construction, aerospace and defense, professional services, etc.
In the past few years, the project management software has moving toward, or at least, vendors and analysts are pushing toward, a project portfolio management (PPM) solution. The idea is that an enterprise project management suite that consists of project costing, project billing, project cost management, project scheduling, project collaboration, project resource management, and project portfolio management.
There are several drivers leading us to this strategy and position:
1. Project oriented organizations are adopting the central Project Management Office or Program Management Office (PMO), which establishes the management standards and provides supports for project managers and program managers. An integrated, enterprise level, project management solution is required for supporting the needs of PMO.
2. In the project management software area, many vendors, especially Primavera, has been educating and demostrating the application of integrating the project scheduling with project cost management via earned value analysis. It is now a common expectation that the project software not only supports the scheduling needs of individual project managers, but also provides built-in functionality to track all types of project costs throughout the project lifecycle.
3. Professional Services Automation. Beyond the basic billing and financial related processing needs, the professional service organizations are looking for a resource management solution that can help them to optimize resources. They are also interested in automating its project management process and improve its workforce collaboration among the project team members and the key project stackholders. The integrated colaborative solution includes document and file management, deliverable tracking, and change management.
4. Web based project management tool. The web makes the sharing of project management information very easy. The web based project management not just allow the user to share the information, it also allows the project managers to manage projects, and tracking project progress.
5. IT are asked to justify their investments. Project portfolio management solution which applies the finanical porfolio management theory to analyze and justify the company's project investment arised.
The opportunities and demands are out there, however, it was not easy for ERP to extend its support from a project costing and billing based solution to cover the enterprise project management. It is not about the software but about the mind set and about customer's deployment environment. Many organizations may not even standardize the project management software solution. The project world is actually divided into different sub groups.
There are people who are close with the project execution and would like to have weekly or daily project status and progress traking. There are people who just view project with a somewhat high level with an external or customer facing information. There are again another set of people treat project are high level financial buckets for tracking the resource and expense and may not require any level of breakdown. The different sub groups have different project information needs and required different structure of the data. They may also claim the ownership of their own view and their own data.
With the purchase of Primavera, Oracle now is in a very good position to remove the problems. It would be very interesting to watch how the industry evolves.
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/017594_EN.doc
Primavera has a very popular project scheduling software. Primavera purchase gives Oracle a very good position to the industries like engineering and construction, aerospace and defense, professional services, etc.
In the past few years, the project management software has moving toward, or at least, vendors and analysts are pushing toward, a project portfolio management (PPM) solution. The idea is that an enterprise project management suite that consists of project costing, project billing, project cost management, project scheduling, project collaboration, project resource management, and project portfolio management.
There are several drivers leading us to this strategy and position:
1. Project oriented organizations are adopting the central Project Management Office or Program Management Office (PMO), which establishes the management standards and provides supports for project managers and program managers. An integrated, enterprise level, project management solution is required for supporting the needs of PMO.
2. In the project management software area, many vendors, especially Primavera, has been educating and demostrating the application of integrating the project scheduling with project cost management via earned value analysis. It is now a common expectation that the project software not only supports the scheduling needs of individual project managers, but also provides built-in functionality to track all types of project costs throughout the project lifecycle.
3. Professional Services Automation. Beyond the basic billing and financial related processing needs, the professional service organizations are looking for a resource management solution that can help them to optimize resources. They are also interested in automating its project management process and improve its workforce collaboration among the project team members and the key project stackholders. The integrated colaborative solution includes document and file management, deliverable tracking, and change management.
4. Web based project management tool. The web makes the sharing of project management information very easy. The web based project management not just allow the user to share the information, it also allows the project managers to manage projects, and tracking project progress.
5. IT are asked to justify their investments. Project portfolio management solution which applies the finanical porfolio management theory to analyze and justify the company's project investment arised.
The opportunities and demands are out there, however, it was not easy for ERP to extend its support from a project costing and billing based solution to cover the enterprise project management. It is not about the software but about the mind set and about customer's deployment environment. Many organizations may not even standardize the project management software solution. The project world is actually divided into different sub groups.
There are people who are close with the project execution and would like to have weekly or daily project status and progress traking. There are people who just view project with a somewhat high level with an external or customer facing information. There are again another set of people treat project are high level financial buckets for tracking the resource and expense and may not require any level of breakdown. The different sub groups have different project information needs and required different structure of the data. They may also claim the ownership of their own view and their own data.
With the purchase of Primavera, Oracle now is in a very good position to remove the problems. It would be very interesting to watch how the industry evolves.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Access Primavera Project Data using ODBC
I did some study on the Primavera project data for our data warehouse project over this weekend. The past week is my first week of joining the business intelligence analytics application development group.
Primavera P3 and Suretrak were built on the Btrieve database. Primavera provides a ODBC driver - Odbc32v2 for those who want to access their data via ODBC to build their custom reports. This is their old interface since, I beileve, Primavera is now built on top of Oracle database.
I found that the following tables are available in their database:
Primavera is one of the data collection points. The structure of the elements captured in the Primavera schedule determines how the project schedule can integrate with the other project management related systems, such estimation, cost control, accounting, resource management, etc. My philosophy is that with a proper integration design, an organization can bring their project data from different systems into their project data warehouse.
It is important for us to support Primavera's various structures, including activity codes, WBS, and Cost Account. Once we get the structure into our data warehouse, people can create their own reports using our leading BI tools. These structure can be the "conformed dimension" so the data from various source can be viewed together.
Comparing with Microsoft Project, Primavera's structure is actually much simpler, in my opinion. My next study will be the Microsoft Project database.
A major progress has been made this weekend.
Primavera P3 and Suretrak were built on the Btrieve database. Primavera provides a ODBC driver - Odbc32v2 for those who want to access their data via ODBC to build their custom reports. This is their old interface since, I beileve, Primavera is now built on top of Oracle database.
I found that the following tables are available in their database:
- Activities
- WBS Structure and WBS assignment
- Activity Code and Activity Code Assignment
- Activity Relationship
- Resource
- Custom Data Item
- Cost Account
- Holiday Information
- Project Options
Primavera is one of the data collection points. The structure of the elements captured in the Primavera schedule determines how the project schedule can integrate with the other project management related systems, such estimation, cost control, accounting, resource management, etc. My philosophy is that with a proper integration design, an organization can bring their project data from different systems into their project data warehouse.
It is important for us to support Primavera's various structures, including activity codes, WBS, and Cost Account. Once we get the structure into our data warehouse, people can create their own reports using our leading BI tools. These structure can be the "conformed dimension" so the data from various source can be viewed together.
Comparing with Microsoft Project, Primavera's structure is actually much simpler, in my opinion. My next study will be the Microsoft Project database.
A major progress has been made this weekend.
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