Spend Time on your Projects, Not on Reporting
Project Managers work in a constantly changing environment and are often looking for ways to manage the multitude of data elements within their reach. Typically the data is available, but it is scattered across different screens and the project managers need to spend a long time in consolidating them. This would always mean a customization and would require some lead time for the IT team to develop it.
Another major limitation has been that the the Oracle Projects suite of applications requires the project managers to be always connected to the system to access the information. Most of the project managers are at client locations and do not have access to the ERP applications.
What they really desire is that the desired reports can be configured easily and are directly delivered to their mail-box at specified time so that they can take informed decisions. These features have been address by Oracle using the Reporting Pack functionality in R12.1
Reporting Pack is a powerful built-in tool that allows the users to design reports to cater to specific needs of your company. It allows an unlimited number of customs deigns. The user can include charts and graphs also in the report. The reports would indicate the overall health of the project and are delivered to the stakeholders at pre-decided intervals by scheduling the reporting pack.
For example the key stake holders would like to review the status of the project bi-weekly and the format has already been agreed upon. Using XML Publisher tools, the system administrator can create new report templates to configure the content and output to meet the business needs. The report templates support colors, images, font styles, headers and footers, and countless other formatting options and the output can be viewed in PDF Format.
Oracle Projects provides a predefined data definition file that contains XML tags for performance measures and project data. Report can pull data for 200+ measures from .The data can be summarized at the project level, task level or even by expenditure category. The data definition template maps to fields in the Oracle base tables. The fields can be used for complex calculations. The distribution list for the reports can be prepared in advance to make sure that the reports are delivered to the authorized users.
Comments
Prasanna,
One challange we may see coming with Vanilla R12 Reporting pack is that it would not allow details to be picked up from DFF attribute columns and also may not allow comprisions across modules like OTL and PA. or PA and AR Eg. A report to give which invoice for the project has got paid
Posted by: Vivek Bhatia | March 31, 2010 4:45 AM