Before you Begin

This 30-minute tutorial shows you how to identify and enter financial and non-financial project benefits. The sections build on each other and should be completed sequentially.

Background

With Projects, you can bridge the gap between project planning systems and the financial planning process. You can assess the impact organizational projects and initiatives have on overall corporate resources and ensure they align with short and long term financial targets.

For indirect and capital projects, you can analyze project finances by tracking project benefits. By planning project benefits, you can quantify the financial benefits to help justify the need for the project. You can also plan the non-financial benefits of a project, which can be used to justify a project and help measure a project's success.

Supported types of project benefits:

  • Financial—You can define financial benefits associated with projects; users can track project performance.
    For example, if you are setting up a new web site, you can track financial benefits that might come out of the project: incremental revenue from leads from the web site, and website inquiries which could lead to call center savings. Or, a new video conferencing facility project can also lead to savings on travel expenses.
  • Non-Financial—You also can define non-financial benefits.
    For example, a new web site might improve the customer satisfaction index, or you might see an incremental increase in your user base by investing in the project. You can quantify the benefits and map them to various project accounts.

Once you define the benefits, you can track the performance.

You can also capture additional qualitative project benefits that aren't trackable with numbers that can help justify projects. For example, you could note that customers will have a better user experience with the improved web site design.

In this tutorial, you identify and enter financial and non-financial project benefits.

What Do You Need?

An EPM Cloud Service instance allows you to deploy and use one of the supported business processes. To deploy another business process, you must request another EPM Enterprise Cloud Service instance or remove the current business process.

  • Have Service Administrator access to an EPM Enterprise Cloud Service instance. The instance should not have a business process created.
  • Upload and import this snapshot into your instance.

Note:

If you run into migration errors importing the snapshot, re-run the migration excluding the HSS-Shared Services component, as well as the Security and User Preferences artifacts in the Core component. For more information on uploading and importing snapshots, refer to the Administering Migration for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud documentation.

Reviewing User Variables

User Variables were added when the business process was created. User variables act as filters in forms, enabling planners to focus only on certain members. In this section, you review the values set for user variables.

  1. Click Navigator (Navigator), then under Tools, click User Preferences.
    User Preferences
  2. On the left, click User Variables.
    User variables
  3. Review the selected members for each dimension:
    User variables with selected Members
  4. Return to the home page. On the upper right, click Home icon (Home).

Navigating to Project Expenses

In this section, you navigate to the Expenses card to start entering project benefits.

  1. On the home page, click Projects, and then Expense.
    Project Expenses

    The Expense card initially opens the Expense Overview dashboard.

    Expense Overview
  2. Review the data point-of-view (POV) and click the Project dropdown list to display its options.
    POV

    The POV members are taken from user variable values. The Project dropdown lists individual projects, as well project types.

    Note:

    The Planning application used in this tutorial includes an indirect project: Digital Web Mobile. To learn more how the project was added, see the Adding Indirect Projects tutorial.
  3. Click and review the following vertical tabs:
    Indirect horizontal tabs

    • Expense Overview—displays a high-level dashboard-type view of project expenses.
    • Driver Based—enables you to perform driver-based planning by setting up expense assumptions.
    • Direct Input—enables you enter expenses directly in a spreadsheet-like grid format and plan project benefits.
    • Review Project Expense—enables you to review overall expenses for a project.
    • Assumptions—enables you to review global rate assumptions that drive project financials.

Adding Financial Benefits

  1. From the vertical tabs on the left, click Direct Input (Direct Input).

    Direct Input opens with Expense Direct Entry displayed.

    Expense Direct Entry
  2. From the horizontal tabs, click Project Financial Benefits.
  3. In the point-of-view (POV), verify that Project is set to Digital Web Mobile.
    POV
  4. In the grid, enter or select the following values:
    Financial Benefis
  5. Click Save.
  6. At the information message, click OK.
    Information message

    Data is saved to Planning and updated on the form.

    Data is saved.

Reviewing the Overall Project Benefits

  1. From the cards on top, click Project Summary.
    Project cards
  2. In the Indirect Overview dashboard, verify that the Projects POV is set to Digital Mobile Web.
    POV
  3. Review the project summary:
    Project Summary

    Project benefits is still in the negative. You will be entering additional project benefits in the next section.

Adding Non-Financial Benefits

  1. From the cards on top, click Expense.
    Expense card
  2. Verify that you are on Project Financial Benefits of the Direct Input vertical tab.
    Project Benefits horizontal tab
  3. Click the Project Non Financial Benefits horizontal tab.
  4. Verify that the Project POV is set to Digital Mobile Web.
    POV
  5. Enter the following quantitative measures:
    Quantitative Measures
  6. Hover your mouse on the top right portion of the first form to display icons and click Save (Save).
    Save
  7. At the information message, click OK.
    Information message
  8. For Project Benefit- Qualitative, enter the following measures:
    Qualitative measures
  9. Hover your mouse on the top right portion of the second form to display icons and click Save (Save).
    Save

Learn More