Welcome to the Project Partners’ on-demand webinar series on Oracle Cloud ERP’s benefits for the Engineering and Construction industry.

This industry is no stranger to challenges, whether it’s complex project management needs or stringent budget controls. Amidst these challenges lies an opportunity to revolutionize how projects are planned, executed, and managed. Oracle’s Cloud ERP empowers organizations to unlock efficiency and achieve unprecedented levels of success.

In this interview, our in-house experts, Bruce Maghan, VP of ERP/Project Solutions, and Neeraj Garg, Executive Consultant of Industry Solutions, explore enabling Finance Management in Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP modules.

What type of modules offered in Oracle Cloud ERP support the finance department?

Bruce: Various modules in Cloud ERP support the finance department. In addition to traditional finance-related applications such as GL, AP, AR, and fixed assets, Oracle Cloud ERP can drive operational transaction accounting from your sub-ledger application. Modules such as projects, purchasing, inventory, and manufacturing, help support timely and accurate accounting of transactions as they occur.

What are the benefits of integrating Oracle Cloud ERP with a PMIS system for enabling the finance department; how does it enhance the efficiency and accuracy of financial processes for E&C organizations?

Bruce: There are many benefits of integrating your Cloud ERP system with a PMIS system that can enhance the capabilities within your finance department, whether it be for an E&C organization or any other organization for that matter.

Integrating Cloud ERP with a PMIS solution drives the efficiency and accuracy of your financial process from several perspectives. The primary one is the alignment of the execution of the project to overall financial plans to ensure your cost expenditures and your revenue align with your current projections.

Does integrating Oracle Cloud ERP with a PMIS system provide any specific budgeting and cost control functionalities? Could you provide specific examples of how the financial management modules enhance decision-making?

Bruce: Integrating Oracle Cloud ERP with a PMIS system provides some enhancements in the areas for the finance department around budgeting and cost control.

Primarily, you can allow your budgets and forecast to be developed within your PMIS system with an interface to Oracle Cloud ERP. Why is this significant? The PMIS system will develop budgets and forecast from the detailed project plan. This results in a much more accurate picture of what things will look like. By leveraging these integrated budgets and forecasts in Cloud ERP, finance can effectively and accurately project your future revenue amounts, your cash flow, and potential cost impacts.

What reporting and analytics capabilities does Oracle Cloud ERP offer for the Finance Department? How do these features help E&C companies gain insights and make informed financial decisions?

Neeraj: From a finance perspective, Cloud ERP offers three reporting layers. You start with the basic OTBI, or Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence, which is an overriding factor across all of the modules in the Cloud ERP and provides transactional reporting or operational reporting that people need on a regular basis for things like:

• Did I make the right journal entries?
• Did the right accounting happen for my transactions from my project system to my GL?

The next level up is financial statements. There is a financial statement/report generator out of the box. It allows you to define your financial statement reports, automatically generate financial statements, and securely provide access only to those that need it.

Finally, Oracle has a comprehensive analytics offering, which has to be licensed separately but will deliver functionality around the ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) from Cloud ERP into the analytics engine and prebuilt analytics functions. There is a very robust and strong functionality around reporting in Cloud ERP.

Could you share any success stories or case studies of E&C companies implementing Cloud ERP with a PMIS system to enable the Finance Department?

Neeraj: Absolutely. So there are numerous success stories of customers using Cloud ERP with a PMIS add-on or supplemented by PMIS systems. This combination provides significant benefits not just to the operations team, the project managers, and the PMO but also to the finance organization. Let me give you an example of a firm that acts like a professional services organization, like an engineering firm, which uses Microsoft Project as a scheduling tool on top of the Oracle Cloud ERP and Cloud PPM modules.

The project managers use Excel Projects to schedule their projects, resource them, and then bring that information into Cloud ERP. This provides Oracle Cloud PPM with a very accurate view of what is proposed to be spent on the project.

As you move forward based on the schedule and the resources, which lets the project managers generate an accurate forecast for the project. This forecast is then used by project managers and PMOs, and also by finance determined to drive revenue recognition for the project and to do roll-ups of project-level forecasts up to the organization level to provide organization forecasting along with the financial statements.

Be sure to tune in and watch our next episode in this series, where we will dive into enabling the Project Management Office through interconnected financial execution and delivery tools.

To view the first episode on Contract Management, click here.

To view the second episode on Supply Chain Management, click here.