The chapter discusses examples that demonstrate how project managers and buyers can use Oracle Project Procurement Command Center Plus to monitor the progress of project procurement and ensure that the project is insulated from various procurement delays and issues.
This chapter covers the following topics:
Reviewing the procurement status enables you to quickly identify project risks, make a decision and take the appropriate action. The regions display the various status data that helps you in making effective decisions to meet the project's objectives.
The charts on the project manager's command center indicate the current status for the project. You can see how much quantity has been requested, ordered, received, and invoiced for each task or for each calendar month. You can see the status of plan lines and negotiations. You can see where you have incurred unplanned spend and the status of procurement for each task.
See: Viewing Procurement Planning Information and Metrics, Chapter 3 - Planning Procurement: Project Manager Actions and Reviewing Project Procurement Plan in Chapter 4 - Processing Procurement: Project Buyer Actions.
Review exceptions to find potential problems and take corrective action. The conditions causing the exception must be resolved in order for the alert to be disabled. Exceptions display:
Items with delayed shipments. Through this alert, suppliers have indicated that the items are going to be received later than the need-by-date.
Items past need-by-date but not received yet. This alert indicates that the items have not been received on-time.
Items past order-by-date but not ordered. This alert indicates that any further delay in submitting requisitions could potentially cause delivery delays.
Exceptions help you view and assess the problems and exceptions on the project before they actually cause schedule delays or wastage. Click on these exceptions to see the plan lines with an exception, and quickly resolve the problems even before they occur.
See: Viewing Procurement Planning Information and Metrics, Chapter 3 - Planning Procurement: Project Manager Actions and Reviewing Project Procurement Plan in Chapter 4 - Processing Procurement: Project Buyer Actions.
Use the exceptions to avoid project delays due to procurement issues. Through the Exceptions region, the Promised Date field in the Orders region, and Scheduled Start Date field in the Task region, you can view when a given task is at risk if material is not received by the expected date. For example, if the supplier indicates there will be a delivery delay on an item by submitting a change request, and you see that the promised date has been pushed by a month, but your task needs the material this month, you know there is a likely delay and you can take steps to correct it.
One of the ways you can resolve this is by reviewing the status of other projects that need the same material, using Item Analysis page. In this case, you find another project in the same area which has recently received this material, but they do not need the material until next month. You could possibly talk to the project manager and see if you can request their material in the interim. Of course, this case depends on the kind of contract you have with the customer.
Oracle Project Procurement Command Center Plus enables project managers and buyers keep the project on track by monitoring material availability.
For example, you have a task that needs to start next month, but all material is not received and the supplier is unable to deliver the material on-time and has indicated a month's delay. Assume that it is not possible to get the material for this task through alternative means; you can push the task into the future until the material is delivered. However, before you do that, you may want to check if there are any other tasks that have all the material needed, by expanding the search, for example increasing the time to search within. The search results will indicate if the tasks have all the material they require using the available resources. You can swap tasks by performing the Update Multiple Tasks action to use the material you partially received for the original task.
Project managers and buyers can use the charts and metrics in the command centers or the analysis pages to measure if the procurement decisions are in-line with the strategic objectives. If the project's objective is to procure from local suppliers, then you can quickly see how far you have achieved that objective by viewing the Approved, Local Suppliers chart.
If the objective is to reduce unplanned spend, then you can monitor that on a daily basis using the Unplanned Orders chart.
If the objective is to reduce supplier's delivery lead-time to ensure lean processes or to reduce material / service variety by buying more of what has been bought before, then you could measure that too.
These charts enable you to measure how well project managers and buyers are making decisions or taking actions that promote the strategic objectives set out for the project.