Project Planning in Oracle EPM Cloud

By Yugwan Mittal

Is Project Planning key to the success of your organisation?

Do you want to make project investment decisions based on the facts and analytics such as ROI, NPV, past trends etc?

Do you struggle to reconcile your program-level budgets with individual projects?

If the answer to any of the questions above is YES, then you will find this article beneficial. By the end of it, you will get an idea about this not very old, yet very robust and versatile Project Planning application called ‘EPM PROJECTS’ that is transforming the architecture and design of modern-day Projects-Centric enterprise solutions.

Before we dwell on ‘EPM Projects’ let’s try to understand the bigger picture first

In EPM Cloud, Oracle has introduced prebuilt modules that can be used to address the planning needs of any organisation – these out-of-the-box planning modules are not just unsupported ‘starter templates’ from an app store. Instead, they can be tailored to the specific needs of a business and yet remain fully upgradeable by Oracle.

So, you could have a solution with the right blend of recommended best practices from oracle and bespoke alterations to cater to your unique business requirements. The picture below shows the different modules in Oracle Cloud EPM

Coming Back to EPM PROJECTS

To become leaner, profitable and result-oriented, more and more organisations have started to adopt ‘Project’ as the preferred way to track their work and investments. In addition to the conventional metrics, businesses today have increasingly started considering financial and non-financial qualitative measures as the key factors to measure the performance of their projects and portfolios.

For all these reasons and many more, Project Planning has become even more critical for the success of modern-day organisations. EPM Projects addresses these needs by providing a comprehensive and robust toolset. Here are some examples -

1. Aligned Corporate and Project Priorities – Identify and prioritise projects using metrics such as NPV, Payback period, IRR, ROI, etc to align project investments with the strategic goals of an organisation.

2. Right Investment Decisions– By leveraging the out-of-the-box integration between project planning and financial planning modules, you can see the impact of project investment decisions and their performance on the organisation-wide financial statements such as balance sheets, P& L and Cash flow statements.

3. Projects Planning for All - Provides capabilities to manage financial and resource planning for all kinds of projects such as contract, capital, and internal

Project Planning for Indirect Projects

A lot of organisations spend circa 60-70% of their annual cost budgets on indirect projects such as IT system upgrades, Research and Development, marketing etc. EPM Projects support the planning of indirect projects by enabling the portfolio managers to choose projects based on their benefits that are best aligned to the financial and strategic goals of the organisation. EPM Projects further allow tracking of the project performance against these financial and non-financial benefits.

Project planning for Contract Projects

For any project-based business contract projects are revenue-generating projects. In addition to Cost planning, EPM Projects support advanced revenue modelling for various kinds of contracts such as Fixed Price, Time and material, cost plus, etc.

Revenue Recognition helps you recognise revenue based on performance obligations using accounting standards such as IFRS 15.

Project planning for Capital Projects

Projects in this category are in general capital intensive and involve large financial commitments by the business. To address the specific needs of Capital Project Planning, you have an option to partially or fully capitalise expenses, which can further be allocated to single or multiple capital assets. Inbuilt integration between Projects planning and Capital Planning modules enables the tracking of CIP assets through to capitalisation.

Using the Project Capitalisation Option, allocate project expenses to single or multiple assets. You also have an option to capitalise a portion of the project cost.

Integration with other Applications

Any project-related application must integrate well with the other applications within the system landscape of an organisation. Oracle recognises this very well; therefore, have provided inbuilt options to integrate EPM Projects with other modules in the planning cloud and ERP Projects cloud, this is on top of the other integration utilities like data management, etc.

Integration with modules within EPM Planning - EPM Projects integrates with the Financials module for managing project cash flows, with Capital planning for planning capital projects and workforce for allocating Labor to projects.

Integration with Oracle Project Management Cloud (ERP) - Out-of-the-box integration between EPM Project Planning and ERP Projects (Oracle Fusion Cloud Project Management) supports unified planning, budgeting, execution and analysis of Projects across the two applications. The combination of the two applications allows an organisation to do strategic planning in EPM Projects and drive that down to the ERP Projects for execution.

To Summarise

Project Planning in EPM offers a very compelling value proposition to Project Centric organisations. The preceding is just a quick summary of the solution. For a more detailed discussion please reach out to me at yugwan@projectsexpert.com

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About Projects Expert

Projects Expert is the first of its kind Oracle partner that specialises in Project Centric Enterprise Solutions. We aim to deliver sustainable, robust and business-friendly Oracle solutions for Projects driven organisations.

To know more about what we can do for you, visit our website at www.projectsexpert.com. Reach out to us on +44 330 330 5154 or drop a note at info@projectsexpert.com