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Oracle Enables Earned Value Management to Improve Project Delivery

With evolving government standards and securities laws increasing pressure to adopt stringent cost and earned-value standards, many organizations today recognize the need to incorporate comprehensive cost management and earned-value analysis capabilities into their project portfolio management systems.

Earned value, a critical dimension of the execution of large and complex projects, provides an integrated view of progress that encompasses cost, scope, and schedule, enabling deeper project analysis and more intelligent decision making.

The earned value management (EVM) methodology entails comparing the amount and cost of what was planned to be completed against what work has actually been completed, and how much that work has cost. Such a comparison enables greater precision in forecasting the final cost of the project and whether it will be completed on, behind, or ahead of schedule.

“There has always been keen interest in earned value management, but it’s been seen as something that’s difficult to do,” says Ray McEntee, Oracle director of product strategy. “The challenge has been in capturing all the necessary data and then performing the calculations.”

The new Primavera Unifier EVM module overcomes these hurdles by enabling general contractors and owners to leverage data directly from Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management.

“No configuration is required—data flows from Primavera P6 EPPM straight into Primavera Unifier, which does the calculations and creates EVM indexes,” McEntee says. “The system automatically generates standard graphs, including ones for budget-at-completion, end value, planned value, and actual costs. Users don’t have to do any of the upfront work themselves, which saves them a significant amount of time.”

The new Primavera Unifier EVM capability allows users to leverage data from Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management to:

• Import multiple projects from Primavera P6 EPPM into a single Primavera Unifier project activity sheet, creating a consolidated view of the costs and earned value. The new EVM capability in Primavera Unifier incorporates resource spreads and progress information from the Primavera P6 EPPM schedule data.
• Create rate sheets by resource and role with escalating rates. Rate sheets can also be created at a company or project level and be assigned to a mirror of the Primavera P6 EPPM projects within Primavera Unifier through the activity sheets. This allows different rates to be assigned to each P6 project and even to the P6 project baselines.

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