The Oracle Projects suite of applications has always suffered from a reporting problem, or at least many user organisations have, for a long time, had a perception that this is the case. The reason for this can be summarised into a couple of salient points:

• There have always been widely diverse reporting requirements for Projects reporting, not only between user organisations, but also between different users groups within these organisations.
• Oracle has never quite come up with a ‘one size fits all’ solution to reporting in Projects. In fact the reporting capabilities in Projects have never really measured up to the rich functionality offered by these applications.

So taking a step back and thinking for a minute one can conclude that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. To report from the Projects applications you need to consider various options and be prepared to use multiple solutions, even within one organisation, dependent on requirements. There are a numerous options / combinations for consideration, and the selection of the most appropriate ones can be a bit of a minefield, even for the specialist. I do not, in this article, seek to migrate through this minefield, but to let people know that there is something new out there that needs to be considered. That is the R12.1.1 Projects Reporting Pack.

What is it?

It is a feature that enables you to monitor project performance without accessing the applications i.e. it sends reports to via email to recipients who are key members on a project(s). A number of reporting templates are supplied that can be added to a ‘reporting pack’ which is then run through the standard concurrent manager and distributes the reports accordingly.
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