By Alison Weiss

Whether building petrochemical facilities in the Middle East or managing mining operations in Australia, project managers face significant challenges. Local regulations and currencies, contingent labor, hybrid public/private funding sources, and more threaten project budgets and schedules.

According to Mike Sicilia, senior vice president and general manager for the Oracle Primavera Global Business Unit, there will be trillions of dollars invested in industrial projects around the globe between 2012 and 2016. But even with so much at stake, project leads don’t always have time to look for new and better enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) software solutions to manage large-scale capital initiatives across the enterprise.

Oracle’s recent acquisition of Skire, a leading provider of capital program management and facilities management applications available both in the cloud and on premises, gives customers outstanding new EPPM options. By combining Skire’s cloud-based solutions for managing capital projects, real estate, and facilities with Oracle’s Primavera EPPM solutions, project managers can quickly get a solution running that is interoperable across an extended enterprise.

Staff can access the EPPM solution within days, rather than waiting for corporate IT to put technology in place.

“Staff can access the EPPM solution within days, rather than waiting for corporate IT to put technology in place,” says Sicilia.

This applies to a problem that has, according to Sicilia, bedeviled project managers for decades: extending EPPM functionality into the field. Frequently, large-scale projects are remotely located, and the lack of communications and IT infrastructure threatened the accuracy of project reporting and scheduling.

Read the full version of this article in the November 2012 edition of Oracle's Profit Magazine: Special Report on Project Management