Oracle Project Portfolio Management with a Move to Fusion Cloud Applications
Case Study – Software
After 20+ years on Oracle E-Business Suite, a global software, consulting, and technology company operating in 140+ countries with 30,000+ employees migrated to Oracle Fusion Cloud, adding Oracle Project Management along the way.
The Challenge
The company had never used Oracle Projects, relying instead on the General Ledger and a patchwork of offline spreadsheets to manage project accounting. This created conflicting data, errors, and heavy dependence on individual project managers to keep information current. Moving to Cloud meant finally implementing Oracle Project Management, but the company still needed a reliable way to create and maintain thousands of projects and related data each month.
For project creation, the team initially planned to use More4apps, but internal approval for outside software took longer than expected. To keep the project moving, they turned to Oracle’s FBDI templates instead. Even after customizing them for usability, FBDI required extensive job aids and training, and its error messages remained difficult for everyday users to interpret.
For ongoing project maintenance, though, no standard Oracle tool could handle the volume. Building a custom in-house API was considered, but it demanded heavy upfront development, specialized PPM REST API knowledge, and ongoing support costs. PPM Implementation Specialist Rob recommended the More4apps Projects Module instead. Its Excel-based interface let users download, edit, and mass-upload project data, with built-in validation and clear error messaging.
“I put in macros and Visual Basic and stuff like that to make it more intuitive,” Rob said. “If I had More4apps earlier, I would’ve used that from the get-go and built my inputs around that. If you build a whole solution around mass project creation and maintenance with More4apps rather than using FBDI, then you’ll have download and upload functionality and the columns are way more user-friendly. In FBDI, you don’t have anything like the download function unless you build a report, but it doesn’t come out in a format comparable to More4apps.”
The Results
- Updated a DFF value across 9,000 projects in under an hour, a task that would have taken six days manually
- Completed nearly 25,000 project and task updates in under seven hours post go-live, versus roughly 17 days manually
- Now maintains projects across 70+ countries with a lean team
“The time saved in testing cycles is virtually impossible to quantify,” said Rob. “Without More4apps, I am not sure we would have even been able to successfully test PPM.”