By Rajesh Silswal

In both Release 12 and 11.5.10, out-of-the-box integration between Oracle E-Business Suite Projects and Oracle Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) allows the collection of maintenance costs into Oracle Projects from EAM. You can carry out maintenance activities and consume different resources, and the resulting costs of those activities can be transferred into Oracle Projects. These can be brought in as an accounted cost or an unaccounted cost and will facilitate the analysis of Project Based P&Ls. Oracle treats internal maintenance costs as Work in Process (WIP) and is used in conjunction with an Oracle WIP Job. Utilizing Oracle Project Manufacturing enables the integration of Oracle Projects and EAM. You cannot leverage this standard out-of-the-box integration without configuring PJM along with Oracle Projects and Oracle EAM.

Additionally, if you utilize Oracle Purchasing, standard configurations and integration further support EAM by allowing EAM-based Purchase Orders to create corresponding commitments in the Oracle Projects module. That’s the good news!

Now for the “gotcha’s,”… There are some challenges to be aware of. Project financial tasks cannot be mapped to the multiple operations required to complete the Oracle Work Order. A financial task can only be linked to the Work Order header and not at the line level. This prohibits the smooth flow of flexible task structure functionality provided in Oracle Projects to EAM. There is a “workaround” – If there are multiple financial tasks on a project needing cost collection from EAM, you must create multiple Work Orders to ensure the integration flow. While this works, it is not the most elegant process to follow and presents operational challenges.

We have seen creative solutions to this challenge. Listed below are two of these.

• • Customer X mapped an Oracle Project to a single EAM Work Order. This requirement created a design limitation where we had to define a single EAM task and dedicate it to the Work Order. In this case, the Project had the visibility of the rolled-up cost from EAM mapped to a single task with various expenditure types/resources. The problem was resolved by automatically creating the Project, Task, and Work Order and linking them to ensure an improved end-user experience.

• Customer Y had multiple financial tasks and required costs to be collected from EAM Work Orders. Each Project with multiple Work Orders was mapped to one financial task, and one Work Order was created. Again this was operationally less challenging and more user-friendly, with the integration between Oracle Project tasks and an Oracle Work Order.

As you can see, the solutions are not perfect. The integration and functional gaps between Oracle Projects and Enterprise Asset Management can be better handled if we think through the details of the financial task structure of that Project and design it accordingly. Additionally, suppose the relation between an Oracle Project and Oracle EAM Work Order is adequately thought through and configured. In that case, more robust integration may be achieved with minor customization and stricter process discipline.