Oracle Project Contracts addresses the needs of commercial contractors, subcontractors and government agencies that operate in project-driven environments characterized by:

• ever-changing contract specifications
• volatile demand and long lead-times
• high percentage of procure-to-contract components and services
• contractual requirements for billing
• complex and incremental funding in multiple currencies
• compliance of government regulations

Executive and operational management constantly face issues of budgetary constraints, contract margins, risk management, flowdown of contract information to subcontractors, and prioritization of contract deliverables. Oracle Project Contracts is designed to address these business issues by providing a comprehensive contract management solution with:

• robust authoring of all types of contract documents
• workflow-based contract administration, including status control, hold and change management
• comprehensive contract funding
• advanced deliverable tracking, integrated with ERP functions like planning, production, and procurement
• contract costing, billing, and revenue recognition
• comprehensive role-based access security
• contract flowdown

Oracle Project Contracts is also designed to support internet business practices. It allows full electronic flow of contract information from end customers down to the lowest tier subcontractors in the contracting chain. It provides key business benefits such as:

• any time, any where access to contract information, web browser based with comprehensive security
• architected on proven technology and open standards
• proactive instead of reactive management
• better audit trails for all contracts

Oracle Project Contracts is an integral part of the Oracle Projects Applications family, and is tightly integrated with Project Costing, Project Billing, and more. Oracle Project Contracts also shares the same Contracts Core as the rest of Oracle˳ E-Business Suite. Oracle Project Contracts can also be deployed as a stand-alone solution.

Authoring with Complete Contracting Lifecycle Support

Oracle Project Contracts allows contract managers to author contract documents throughout the entire contracting lifecycle —from solicitations, bids and proposals in the acquisition phase to awarded contracts, basic ordering agreements and delivery orders in the award and execution phase.

Flexible Contract Document Types

Different industries like Aerospace and Defense, Engineering and Construction, Professional Services, Telecommunications, and Public Sector use different terminology for contract documents. For example, the acquisition process can refer to a �solicitationˠdocument as Request For Information (RFI), Request For Proposal (RFP), Invitation For Bid (IFB), or simply Solicitation. Oracle Project Contracts allows flexible definition of contract document types.

Sales Contracts and Procurement Contracts

Oracle Project Contracts allows the management of contracts from both the perspective of a contract issuer (outbound procurement contracts, with intent to buy) and the perspective of a contract recipient (inbound sales contracts, with intent to sell).

Authoring Wizard

Oracle Project Contracts includes an Authoring Wizard that guides users through the process of creating a new contract document. A new contract document can be created from another contract document of any supported type (for example, creating a proposal from an existing proposal, a solicitation, or an existing awarded contract), or from pre-defined templates. Users can select a subset of contract information that needs to be copied to the new contract document.

Articles, Terms and Conditions, Standard Notes, and Statement of Work

Oracle Project Contracts allows users to setup repositories of standard articles (standard contract clauses or regulations such as FAR and DFARS) and terms and conditions (such as shipping method, payment terms, freight terms, and so on) that can be assigned to any contract document, including templates. Users can also enter statement of work (scope of work) and as well as standard notes for any contract documents, or for a particular contract line.

Contract Work Breakdown Structure (CWBS)

Users can define contract work breakdown structures using contract lines (CLINs, ELINs), and sublines (SLINs) in unlimited hierarchies. Articles, terms and conditions, standard notes, and parties can be assigned at each level.

Contracting Parties

Contracting professionals can assign many parties in different contract business roles to a contract document. Business roles can represent different services like billing, payment centers, work performed at, ship-to, ship-from, and so on. Parties can be external trading partners or internal organizations. Users can also enter the personal contacts with whom they interact.

Extensible Attributes

Realizing that different industries and legacy systems track contract attributes in different ways, Oracle Project Contracts embeds the capability to define and also flowdown user-definable attributes. Users can add as many user-definable attributes as needed by their business requirements.

Contract Administration

Oracle Project Contracts provides a variety of tools to simplify contract administration throughout the complete contract lifecycle.

Contract Approval and Status Management

Oracle Project Contracts allows users to model business processes based on different business requirements using Oracle Workflow. Users can define different approval hierarchies and cycles for different document types, and define appropriate escalation routines and notifications to alert administrators, managers and other responsible parties about approaching deadlines for proposal submittals, solicitation response receipts.

Change Management and Versioning

Managing contract changes is one of the most important yet time-consuming aspects of contract management. Oracle Project Contracts includes a robust change management and versioning mechanism to enable contracting professionals to manage amendments and modifications to contract documents, and provides a clear audit trail of contractual requirements over time. Change management is workflow-based to implement approval and review routings of contract changes through the organization. Change management also includes an "undo" feature to handle the receipt of out-of-sequence amendments and modifications.

Contract Hold Management

Oracle Project Contracts allows users to define holds at different levels (header, line, deliverable) with different hold reasons, to analyze holds and the promptness of their resolution, and to track release due dates and reasons. Hold management is workflow-based to allow modeling of business processes for different hold reasons.

Comprehensive Security Framework

Oracle Project Contracts provides a comprehensive and robust security framework to control accesses to contracts, contract functions as well as individual contract attributes. By providing this model, even the most secured contracts (for example Defense contracts) can be maintained in the system, with access controlled by user clearance levels.

Contract Execution

Contract execution is arguably the most crucial phase of the contracting lifecycle. Oracle Project Contracts provides several mechanisms to ensure timely delivery and receipt of products, services, and other contractual obligations.

Deliverable Tracking System

The Deliverable Tracking System (DTS) is the centerpiece of Contract Execution and is used to track all activities related to a contract. Deliverables can be inbound and outbound, and can be internal or external. Examples of trackable deliverables include planned receipt and shipment of items, mailing of an initial engineering drawing, or monthly submission of progress reports. The DTS also allows users to define dependencies between contract deliverables.

ERP Integration

The Deliverable Tracking System is integrated with other major components of Oracle E-Business Suite, including Oracle Projects, Advanced Planning and Scheduling, Oracle Internet Procurement, and Oracle Shipping Execution. This integration allows users to collect cost against a contract through projects and tasks; generate billing events and recognize revenue; feed contractual demand into the planning system and receive feedback on planning recommendations such as suggested reschedules; create procurement documents such as purchase requisitions and purchase orders for direct-procured contract material and other items that are not sourced through planning; create shipment requests for deliverables and track shipping and delivery statuses. Contract related information from other E-Business Suite components can also be viewed and tracked within the DTS with additional drilldown capability. All integration points can utilize Oracle Workflow controls, and even be configured to integrate with non-Oracle systems.

Printed Forms

Oracle Project Contracts provides a generic print form generation mechanism. This allows users to generate and store forms mandated by the customers or suppliers, such as US Government forms SF1149, DD250. This print form generation capability can be integrated with an external system to create paper or electronic outputs (for electronic submission) of the desired forms.

Communications

Users can enter, analyze, and track communications between contracting parties. Communications can be categorized, prioritized, and analyzed to allow improvements in communication speed.

Contract Finance

Contract Funding

Oracle Project Contracts provides a comprehensive model to define and track contract funding, with support for incremental (time-phased) funding, funding pools, multiple funding parties, hard and soft limits, definitization of funding, multiple currencies and multiple levels, and funding by references such as ACRN. Versioning is also available for contract funding to ensure on-time and auditable implementation of funding modifications.

Contract Billing

Oracle Project Contracts provides robust billing capabilities through its integration with Oracle Project Billing. Oracle Project Contracts allows users to define a myriad of billing methods (also known as �contract types˩, such as Firm Fixed Price, Cost Plus Incentive/Award/Fixed Fee, Time and Materials, and many more. Billing methods can be associated at the contract and contract line level, and be assigned to contract templates.

Periodic Billing and Delivery-based Billing

Oracle Project Billing (or any external billing system) can be used to calculate periodic billings. Users can also drive billing based on completed deliverables in the Deliverable Tracking System. The system allows users to bill multiple events at once, or to just bill individual events. The billing events are automatically created in Oracle Project Billing for further processing.

Invoicing

You can use Oracle Project Billing to generate draft invoices. Draft invoices can be sent to Oracle Receivables for final invoice processing and for collection of payments. Users that have their own billing system could feed the invoices into Oracle Receivables using standard interfaces, or use their own receivables system.

Contract Costing

Oracle Project Costing provides robust cost rollup mechanisms to show costs at all levels of the contract structure. Manufacturing and engineering costs can be collected into Oracle Project Costing via Oracle Project Manufacturing or Oracle Internet Time/ Oracle Time and Labor.

Contract Flowdown

Oracle Project Contracts allows users to configure flowdown of attributes, articles, terms and conditions, standard notes, and attach documents to different business areas, such as Receiving, Shop Floor, and Billing, on a need-to-know basis. The flowdown mechanism can also be used to provide subcontractors with the relevant (prime) contract information.

Oracle E-Business Suite—The Total Solution

Transform the way you conduct business with Oracle's internet-enabled e-business suite. Put your demand chain, supply chain, and internal operations online with Oracle's comprehensive and fully integrated solution. Combine the wide reach of the internet with Oracle's fully globalized product to run your business consistently and accurately worldwide. Reduce costs and complexity by running on corporate internets or the World Wide Web.

As a provider of global consulting, education, and support services, Oracle provides the most complete e-business solution available.

The Oracle E-Business Suite: transforming your business into an e-business