Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Alison Weiss

 Nonprofit and for-profit organizations have many differences, but there is one way they are alike—managers struggle with huge amounts of data generated every day. Project data by itself has limited use—but any organization that can gain insight to make accurate predictions or to use resources more effectively can gain an operational advantage. Oracle’s Primavera P6 Analytics 2.0 business intelligence solution enables organizations using Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management to do just that: identify critical issues and uncover trends in stores of project data.

Primavera P6 Analytics provides management with the ability to look at not only how a single effort is progressing, but also how the entire organization is doing from a project perspective. The latest release includes new features that make it even easier to gather and analyze critical information. For example, the addition of geocoding gives Primavera P6 Analytics users the ability to track resources geographically on longitude and latitude and use a map to get an overall view of how projects, programs, and activities are deployed.

“A nonprofit with relief projects in Vietnam, for example, can drill down to the project and get a world view and a regional view,” says Yasser Mahmud, vice president of product strategy and industry marketing in Oracle’s Primavera Global Business Unit. “Then they can drill down further to show statistics; key performance indicators; and how that program, portfolio, or project work is actually getting done.”

The addition of new mobile capabilities to Primavera P6 Analytics puts deep-dive analysis into project managers’ hands with compatibility with major tablet operating systems. Now, nonprofits or for-profits working in remote locations can provide real-time visibility into projects to alert management if issues are occurring that need to be addressed immediately.

“Primavera P6 Analytics generates information that can help organizations improve their utilization and trim down overall operating costs,” says Mahmud. “But more importantly, it gives organizations improved visibility.”