Oracle Project Foundation

New Concurrent Process

• ADM: Purge Obsolete Projects Data.

iSetup

• New API to enable migration of setup entities across instances. iSetup also handles standard and comparison reporting of master entities in addition to data migration.

 Improved Diagnostics

• All R11i diagnostics scripts are now available for R12.1.1.  In addition, some new scripts have been added to support new R12.1.1 functionality and architecture changes.

Oracle Project Costing 

• Federal Budgetary Accounting for Project Expenditures via Subledger Accounting
• Contingency Worker Clearing Projects to allow CWK to charge multiple projects
• Additional Project Information in Oracle Time and Labor (Project Name and Task Name)

Oracle Project Billing 

• Cascading Billing Schedule Overrides from project to all tasks or top task to all tasks
• Agreement Definition Enhancements
  • Start Date
  • Customer order number and accounting reference
  • Billing sequence number
  • Advance Required checkbox
  • 15 additional descriptive flexfield attributes (bringing the total to 25)

Prepayment Receipt Applications

• Advance payment receipts entered in Oracle Receivables can now be associated with Agreements. The “Apply Receipt” button allows the receipts to be related to the agreement.
• Receipts are automatically applied to the Project invoices when interfaced with Oracle Receivables.
• Allows cash to be identified to a specific agreement up front and automatically draws down that cash balance.
• When the advance is required, total funding cannot exceed the advance payments associated with the agreement.  Therefore billings cannot exceed advance amounts.
• A client extension is available to determine which customers must provide an advance payment. The advance required flag will be enabled or disabled for the agreement. In addition, a new security function allows the flag to be overwritten.

 Federal Budgetary Accounting for Project Revenue

• Additional journal entries are available in Subledger Accounting for the required Federal Budgetary entries.

Date Effective Funds Consumption

• Project Type option that requires cost and event transaction dates to fall within the agreement start and end dates.
• Transactions are only billed against the agreement if the entire transaction amount can be funded (no partial recognition) for both revenue and invoicing.
• Without enabling this option, revenue generation supports partial billing for transactions.

 New Parameters for MGT: Invoice Review

• Project Status
• Project Closed After Date
• Project Range

New Parameters for MGT: Unbilled Receivables Aging

• Project Status
• Project Closed After Date
• Project Range

Oracle Project Management 

New Audit Process for Project Performance Reporting Setup

• AUD: Project Performance Reporting Setup

New Parameters for Refresh Project Performance Data Process

• Actual or All Amounts (Plan and Actual)
• Workplan Version
• Financial Plan Version

Workplan Enhancements

Ability to Delete Published Workplan Versions (except the latest published version, baseline version, and workplan versions included in a program hierarchy)

 Usability Enhancements

• Update Work Breakdown Structure page is now obsolete.
• View, maintain, and update a work plan structure from the Update Tasks page.
• Where no latest published workplan version exists, the current working version displays on the Update Tasks page when navigating to the Workplan Tasks.
• Indent or outdent multiple workplan tasks in a single step.
• Confirmation, information, and warning messages appear on HTML pages during Apply Latest Progress and the Submit Progress processes. In addition, messages include status information during processing and the availability of the latest progress information.

New Public API for Creating, Maintaining, and Deleting Programs

A new set of public API procedures:

• 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

Budgeting And Forecasting Enhancements

 Enhanced Automatic Calculation and Derivation Logic

• For plan lines that do not have a specified quantity, the amount is no longer copied to the quantity field with the rate value set to 1.
• Rate now has lower precedence than quantity and amount in automatic calculations. This is because the rate will be re-derived when the quantity, rate, and amount are entered simultaneously for a plan line.
• When updates override the burden multiplier to the raw cost or burden cost, subsequent calculations will use the override burden multiplier.  The same is true when the markup percent is updated by changes to plan line components:  the override markup percentage will be used in revenue calculations.

Enhanced Handling of Override Rates on Budget / Forecast Lines

• Override rates for a planning transaction on Edit Budget and Edit Forecast pages.

o   Raw Cost Rate

o   Burdened Cost Rate

o   Bill Rate

• Override rates are applied to all existing and new periodic lines for the planning transaction.
• Average rates fields on these pages are now disabled for entry and are used for display only.

 Simplified Addition of Planning Elements and Resources

• New but unbudgeted tasks and resources can be added to a budget or forecast version.
• Add all new tasks and planning resources or new tasks to the current plan version.

Self-Service Expenditure Inquiry

• Ability to drill into expenditure details from the Financials tab.

 Reporting Pack for Generation and Distribution of XML Publisher Reports

• A reporting pack is a set of report templates and recipients by project role.
• The Generate Reporting Pack concurrent program emails the reports generated from the report templates based on pre-defined intervals.
• The report template establishes each report’s layout and content.
• New report templates are configured using XML Publisher tools.
• New or modified reports can be added to an existing reporting pack or be used to create an entirely new report set.
• Predefined data definition files that contain XML tags for performance measures and project data are provided.

Predefined Reports:

• Project Change Document Report
• Project Committed Cost Report
• Project Cost Detail Report
• Project Cost Labor Report
• Project Cost Summary Report
• Project Earned Value Report
• Project Financial Summary Report
• Project Forecast Summary Report
• Project Revenue At Risk Report

Budget Integration with Federal Budget Execution and 3rd Party Budget

• The budget integration workflow supports integration with the Federal Budget Execution module.
• The workflow can be customized to interface budget lines to external budgeting applications.

Microsoft Project 2007 Certification

• Integration with Microsoft Project 2007 is supported.

Project Performance Reporting: Additional Measures

YTD, QTD, and At Completion calculated measures are available on the following pages:

• Performance Overview Period-to-Date
• Summary/Analysis
• Task Summary/Analysis Resource Summary/Analysis

Project Performance Reporting: Inter-Project Revenue / Billing Amounts

Interproject revenue/billing amounts are 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

Supplier Cost Dashboard

Subcontractor Payment Controls

Support for Pay when Paid Scenarios

• A new “Pay when Paid” payment term for subcontracts automatically places holds on all subcontractor invoices under that subcontract until the corresponding customer payment is received.
• The Subcontract Payment Controls workbench allows the project manager to manage the holds, with visibility into both the customer and the related subcontractor invoices.
• Workflow notifications about the receipt of the customer payment allow the project manager to automatically or manually release the subcontract invoice.
• Associations between the customer and subcontractor invoices may be automatically maintained based on the billing of project expenditures for cost-plus contracts or manually maintained for fixed-price contracts.

Payment Controls for Subcontract Deliverables

• Support for the tracking and monitoring of subcontract deliverables that place automatic holds on subcontractor invoices in the case of non-compliance.
• Oracle Procurement Contracts allow a subcontract administrator to specify payment impact controls that will take effect when a subcontract deliverable is not met.
• From the Subcontractor Payment Controls workbench, the project manager can view a checklist of all the current subcontract deliverables to assist in evaluating the subcontractor status before releasing monthly progress payments.

Oracle Project Resource Management

Resource Search Enhancements

• Resource Search by Email Address
• Resource Search by Person Type
• Streamlined Navigation on Staffing Home

 Cross Validation of Project and Assignment Dates

• 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 more significant 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 join 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 can shift the assignment dates or cancel the date adjustment.

 Defaulting of Work Patterns’ From and To Dates

• Work patterns from and to dates will default from the requirement start and end dates.

Improved Exception Handling of Maintain Project Resources Process

• PRC: Maintain Project Resources delivers improved exception handling and notification when it encounters errors while processing employee records.

New Public APIs for Resource Management

The new PJR APIs fall into the following four categories:

• Requirement Public APIs
• Assignment Public APIs
• Candidate Public APIs
• Competence Public APIs

Organization Authority: Obsolete Forecast Authority

• Removes the forecast authority functionality from the organization authority form
• Removes existing security data relating to forecasting authority.
• Replaces the PJR forecast functionality with the new HTML-based forecasting functionality. The new forecasting functionality has its security mechanism and does not honor the old forecast authority model.
• Improves the performance of security calls to organization authority because the existing security data is being removed.

Oracle Grants Accounting

Award Budgeting Enhancements

 Budget period validations

• Budget periods will not be validated across award budgets when those awards fund a single project.
• Flexibility to establish award budgets based on the actual duration of the award while not being confined based on the existing budgets already set for the project.

 Automatic summarization of project budgets

• With the new budget period validations, automatically summarize to a project budget viewable in Project Status Inquiry.
• Two profile options have been added to identify the budget entry methods used to summarize the project budgets.

 Budget Line Sorting Option

• Sort budget lines by Resource name or by effective dates for budgets with date range periods.  It provides the flexibility to view the budget lines by period or by budgeted resource.

 Award Status Inquiry Enhancements

 View by budget period

• Allows the Find Award Status window to be limited to a single period, range of periods, or inception to date for a particular award.
• Reflects the budget periods entered on the award budget.

 GL and PA Date Parameters on the Find Expenditure Items window

• GL and PA date parameters have been added to the Find Expenditure Items window.

 GL Date Parameters on the Find Commitments window

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

Note: These notes were compiled from version 3.7 of the Oracle E-Business Suite Release Content Document for Projects