By Ravi Shankar, PgMP, PMP, PMI-RMP and PMI-SP

The Oracle® E-Business Suite Project Management application (PJT) integrates with Microsoft® Project out-of-the-box to provide bi-directional integration between Oracle E-Business Suite Projects and Microsoft Project (MSP). This provides for downloading the project structure and current working version of the project from Oracle and updating them in MSP to create the detailed work plan structure, together with resource assignments and resource scheduling.

As part of the download process, we download the Planning Resource List defined in PJT, including the Team Role, Jobs, etc. Typically, the work plan planning and scheduling are done in Microsoft Project at the work breakdown structure (WBS) level for the team role, and their requirements are scheduled accordingly. The updated WBS and resource plan are then uploaded to Oracle Projects through the MSP integration. This process creates the update to the current working version of the work plan and creates the resource assignments. Workplan costs and other details can then be reviewed, and the current version can be published and baselined.

The published, baselined work plan can be integrated with Financial Plans and Forecast generation (for costs and revenue) in PJT, and with Oracle E-Business Suite Project Resource Management, through “bottom-up” integration. Bottom-up integration defines a project-level resource requirement from the work plan resourcing created through the MSP upload. This process makes the project team role requirement automatic at the project level. After that, you can use the standard functionalities of Oracle Project Resource Management’s integration with Oracle Time and Labor to track the team role name for Actuals and effective forecasting of Estimated Total Cost in the Mass Update Progress pages of Workplan.