A couple of weeks ago Oracle posted the Release Content Documents for R12.1.3 onto My Oracle Support. Unusually, these have been made available prior to the general availability of R12.1.3 and so are subject to change. However, for Projects users, here are the new and updated features:

Project Foundation

Enhanced Project List Page

In this release Oracle continue to build on past enhancements to the Project List page by making the page more informative, streamline access to common functions and make the page configurable. The enhancements are:

• The project list page includes a report region which was introduced in 12.1.2. With this release Oracle are further improving the usability of this feature by allowing users to delete report views that they have created and to know the criteria and format that went into the creation of a report. The benefits of these enhancements will allow users to have better visibility into their reports and be able to manage the volume of reports over time.
• In “Alternate Search page”, the user can select and save the combination of “search criteria” and “report format” as a report and then run the report from Project List page.
• Easily navigate between project list, simple search, advanced search and alternate search.

Enhanced Diagnostics

Oracle has improved the diagnostics collection scripts in this release around Project Management, Project Performance Reporting, Project Billing and Project Resource Management.

Oracle Project Management

Reporting Performance Improvements

With Release 12.1.3, projects users will greatly benefit from improved performance of the Project Performance Reporting feature. The enhancements include a new parameter that has been added to the Launch Update Project Performance Data and the Update Project Performance Data concurrent programs to filter on project status. Customers will be able to choose a specific project status from an LOV before running the program. This will improve the performance of the programs by allowing customers to streamline the processing.

MSP Integration Enhancements

In Release 12.1.3 there are a couple of significant enhancements to fully extend the coverage of integration with Microsoft Projects.

Support for Non-Shared Task Based Mapping structures

The Non-Shared Task Based Mapping option enables you to map individual workplan structure tasks to individual financial structure tasks. This gives you the greatest flexibility in sharing information between your structures. Prior to release 12.1.3 customers on R12 could not fully integrate with Microsoft Projects if they had chosen to use the Non-Shared Task Based mapping between the workplan and the financial plan.

Support for Partially Shared structure

Partially Shared structure mapping enables you to map workplan and financial structures up to a particular point for your projects, which is useful, for example, when you don’t want all of your workplan details in your financial plans. Prior to release 12.1.3 customers on R12 could not fully integrate with Microsoft Projects if they chose to use the Partially Shared structure option. All structure options are now fully supported in Release 12.1.3 and 11i.

Enhanced Change Management

With this release, the change control features in Oracle Projects have been enhanced to meet specific business needs for the industries that typically use this functionality.

Enhanced Cost & Revenue Planning for Change Documents

You can use a project change document to plan for estimated changes in your direct costs or supplier costs, providing enhanced support for the cost issue planning process. This feature provides project managers improved control over project costs resulting from changes.

Revenue impacts for the cost issue are automatically calculated based on estimated cost changes for cost-based revenue plans, or may be entered manually for projects with separate cost and revenue plans. Users can then view the impact to the project budget, which is automatically generated from the estimated cost and revenue changes. You can then consolidate the planned changes in cost and revenue from multiple change requests into a single change order, to view, approve and implement the budget impacts.

Enhanced Retention Invoice Processing for Outstanding Project Deductions

With this release, the handling of retention invoices has been enhanced to take into consideration any outstanding project deductions. When validating retention invoices in Oracle Payables, a check will be made to verify that all project deductions have been processed. Outstanding project deductions may indicate that there are pending back charges or other miscellaneous costs that need to be recovered from your suppliers, and which need to be taken into account before the retention is released. If there are any unprocessed or unapproved deductions in Oracle Projects, the retention invoice will be placed on hold, until the deductions are processed. This payment hold may also be manually released from the supplier payment control workbench.