Project planning is critical to strategy execution for most organizations, whether serving as a core business process for service and contract providers or prioritizing the deployment of resources for functional areas such as IT, marketing, and capital investment. Oracle’s Enterprise Planning Budgeting Cloud Services (EPBCS) Projects Financial Planning business process addresses these needs by providing capabilities required to manage financial and resource planning for contract, capital, and internal project types in a solution that is deployed quickly with low IT support requirements. This robust toolset incorporates project expense, revenue, and asset requisitions, building a comprehensive and easy-to-use project performance scorecard. The Project Financial Planning business process in EPBCS enables management to effectively and efficiently identify and prioritize projects using project margins and KPI reporting allowing for alignment of project investments with strategic goals.
Building upon a foundation of successful and proven on-premise Project Financial Planning (PFP) capabilities, EPBCS Projects Financial Planning business process delivers significantly more value in the three major ways:
- Financial and non-financial qualitative context for projects, increasing insights into business value decision making.
- Project stage-gating through the use of two new dimensions: Stage and Program, allowing planners to divide projects into multiple phases (ex: requirements, design, marketing, and sales)
- Multi-line planning including direct resource assignment to projects, decreasing planning time by supporting bulk additions.
The EPBCS Projects Financial Planning business process provides the same tight integration between Capital Asset Planning and Workforce Planning found in PFP while still allowing for flexible configuration of new functionality. Organizations can assign individual employees and assets to Projects via the corresponding business processes or plan at a summary pool level. Furthermore, straightforward and intuitive revenue and expense planning capabilities streamline the project summary process producing clearer and faster results and ready-to-consume reports.
In addition to the familiar forms of PFP, calculations, integrations, and business processes, EPBCS Project Financial Planning also brings exciting new functionality. One highlight is the addition of qualitative financial and non-financial metrics as a way to measure project performance. Folding in measurements like cost savings, customer satisfaction, and number of users impacted will allow management to make more informed decisions when evaluating project performance. Suppose, for example, one project from a group of three can continue while the other two must be shelved. One way to decide would be to compare the number of users that would benefit from each project and select the one with the greatest impact.
Another new feature in Projects Financial Planning business process is stage-gating and planning projects by program, as represented by two new dimensions (Stage, Program). Stage-gating enables users to separate projects into distinct phases with their own unique costs, revenues, and drivers. Now project performance can be tracked through different phases such as requirements, design, sales, or marketing which offers benefits across a wide range of industries. The introduction of the Program dimension further enhances the planner’s ability to view and interpret project data by differentiating projects by team or work stream and internal or external projects.
In order to streamline resource planning in the new Projects Financial Planning business process, multi-line planning along with the direct assignment of employees and assets has been introduced. Multi-line planning speeds up the planning process by eliminating the tedious task of adding resources line-by-line. The new direct assignment feature bypasses the reconciliation process by enabling users to assign employees directly to projects without the need for hiring requisitions. Multi-line planning coupled with direct assignment of resources means planners spend less time inputting and consolidating data and more time interpreting data and performing higher value tasks.
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