Last week I was privileged to attend Oracle’s first Fusion Applications Pre-GA Validation Workshop in the UK. This is the fifth such exercise that Oracle has undertaken, the first four being held at Redwood Shores. The event was split into six streams, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Financials, Human Capital Management (HCM), Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Procurement. Given Projected Consulting’s focus on Oracle Projects, I was attending the PPM stream.

On the first day we had a very enthusiastic presentation from Chris Leone, Group VP of Fusion and GRC Applications Development. He gave us a very detailed background about where Oracle currently are with their development of Fusions Applications and why they are doing these Validation Workshops. The key piece of information from Chris’ presentation was that Oracle are committing to deliver Fusion Apps at some point in 2010. Obviously, all the presentations were prefaced with Oracle’s “Safe Harbour” get-out clause, but everyone I spoke to is confident that they are going to hit that date.

The second presentation was delivered by several people from the “User Experience” team. The User Experience (or “UX”) is now very much part of the application design process for Fusion Apps. In fact, wireframe versions of the user interface are trialled in the various usability labs, well before any code is started. The main target for the UX team was to improve user productivity in a number of ways, but the main one is in reducing page navigation and the “click count” required to perform a given task. As Oracle Projects users will know, you have to navigate down through a large number of screens to gather all the information that you need to perform a given task. Comparing the productivity in like-for-like processes being performed in the legacy apps and Fusion Apps there was a significant improvement across the board. However, the biggest improvement was for Projects, with a 60-70% improvement! I was already getting excited and I hadn’t even seen the product. I’ll talk about the details of the new User Interface in a future blog.

The next day we started using Fusion Applications Project Portfolio Management for real. I should state up-front that the code that we were using was actually frozen back in August for the first Validation Workshop. Since then lots of bugs have been fixed and a lot of tuning has been performed. Needless to say the software that we were using was quite slow and did bomb out on a regular basis. But, the point of the exercise was still valid: for customers and partners to get an early look at something that has been talked about for nigh on two years.

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