Oracle Brings Analytics to Project Management
- by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP
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.”