This chapter covers the following topics:
Oracle Project Contracts is designed to support complex contract management needs of project driven organizations, including commercial and government contractors, agencies, and subcontractors. Such organizations operate in a project centric environment characterized by:
Ever-changing contract specifications
Volatile demand and long lead-times
High percentage of procure-to-contract components and services
Contractual requirements for billing
Complex and incremental funding in multiple currencies
Compliance of government regulations
Executive and operational management constantly face issues of budgetary constraints, contract margins, risk management, flowdown of contract information to subcontractors, and prioritization of contract deliverables. Oracle Project Contracts is designed to address these business issues by providing a comprehensive contract management solution with:
Robust authoring of all types of contract documents
Workflow-based contract administration, including status control, hold, and change management
Comprehensive contract funding
Advanced deliverable tracking, integrated with ERP functions like planning, production, and procurement
Contract costing, billing, and revenue recognition
Comprehensive role-based access security
Contract flowdown
Oracle Project Contracts is also designed to support internet business practices. It provides key business benefits such as:
Any time, any where access to contract information, web browser based with comprehensive security
Architected on proven technology and open standards
Proactive instead of reactive management
Better audit trails for all contracts
Oracle Project Contracts is part of Oracle e-Business Suite, an integrated set of e-business solutions for the enterprise, which is designed to efficiently transform your business to an e-business.
Contract Authoring provides support throughout the entire contracting life cycle - from solicitations, bids and proposals in the acquisition phase to awarded contracts. You can define contract document types for different industries that use different terminology such as Construction, Aerospace, Defense, Professional Services, Telecommunications, and Public Sector. You are able to manage contracts from both the perspective of a seller or a buyer.
Oracle Project Contracts provides a variety of tools to enable contracting personnel to administer contracts during their life cycle.
Approval and Status Management
Approval hierarchies and cycles for different document types can be defined. Appropriate escalation routines and notifications are created to alert administrators about deadlines for proposal submittals and solicitation response receipts.
You can manage amendments and modifications to contract documents, an audit trail of contractual requirements is provided. Change management is workflow-based to implement approval and review of changes throughout the organization.
Oracle Project Contracts enables you to define holds or stop work orders at different levels (header, line, or deliverable) with different hold reasons.
The Deliverable Tracking System is used to track all contract activities such as planned receipts and shipments, mailing of an initial engineering drawing, or progress report submissions. It is integrated with Oracle Projects, Advanced Planning and Scheduling, Oracle Purchasing, and Oracle Shipping Execution. Contract related information from the other products can also be viewed and tracked.
Oracle Project Contracts provides a comprehensive model to define and keep track of contract funding and accounting.
You can use incremental funding, funding pools, multiple funding parties, hard and soft limits, and multiple currencies.
You can define different billing methods (such as firm fixed price, cost plus incentive, and time and materials) that can be used by the Projects Billing engine to drive the billing process. Oracle Project Billing, or any external billing system, is used to calculate periodic billings.
Draft invoices can be generated and sent to Oracle Receivables, or your own receivables system, for final invoice processing and for collection of payments. Inquiries are used to compare contract revenue with contract funding.
Oracle Project Contracts enables users to configure flowdown of attributes, articles, terms and conditions, standard notes, and attached documents to different business areas, such as Receiving, Shop Floor, and Billing.
Oracle Project Contracts is architected from the ground up for e-business. Comprehensive use of workflows, flexible attributes, and API framework, and leveraging Oracle's internet development tools, provide companies and agencies with a state-of-the-art collaborative contracting solution.