If you’ve been dying to find a business intelligence app to monitor key project performance metrics, while controlling project costs and improving project performance and profitability, I have some good news for you. Oracle has rolled out an app, Oracle Project Analytics (OPA), designed to do just that.

Analysis

The company claims OPA delivers role-based intelligence targeted at project executives, project and program managers to help track project/program performance and control project costs; take action to improve project portfolio performance; and provide insight into project revenue, billing and profitability.

To help jumpstart your project analysis efforts, the new app features several fancy dashboards. Project Executive provides an organizational view with the visibility and control necessary to monitor organizational performance and the health of projects across the board to improve profitability and improve operating efficiency. Project Management provides a complete view of project performance from a high-level summary of accumulated and trending information for single or group projects down to cost, revenue, and budget transaction details. And, last but not least, Public Sector is designed for the public sector (duh!) and other organizations not reliant on profitability and margin tracking. It’s fully integrated with Oracle’s Financial Analytics module that provides organizations with fact-based and timely insight into their operational budgets and funds management.

Other tasks you can take care of with OPA include: making more timely decisions across the project organization; identifying at-risk projects so you can initiate corrective measures; maximize cash flow with increased insight into payable, commitments, and billings; and control your budgets and costs before they affect project profitability.

Conclusion

But wait—that’s not all. It’s certified with Oracle E-Business Suite (versions 11i10 and R12), PeopleSoft Enterprise (versions 8.9 and 9.0), and Legacy systems through Universal Adapters. And Oracle Business Intelligence apps are also available for financials, procurement and spend, supply chain and order management, human resources, sales, service, marketing, loyalty, price, and a range of specialized industry analytics.

OPA is one of two applications recently introduced with the general availability of Oracle BI Applications Release 7.9.6. It’s built on Oracle’s Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus to take advantage of the software’s hot-pluggable design that enables organizations to extend business intelligence capabilities to existing Oracle and non-Oracle data sources and apps.