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Oracle Projects – Primavera/JD Edwards Integration

Amongst the flurry of press releases that were issued during Open World 2009, was this one that you would have probably missed if you blinked (or had some rain in your eyes…). The press release was titled Oracle Announces Oracle® Application Integration Architecture Release 2.5 which understandably wouldn’t have caught the eye of many Projects users. However, there was something very important nestling in there.

First though, what is Oracle Application Integration Archiecture? Well, here’s Oracle’s definition:

Oracle Application Integration Architecture is the most complete integration solution for orchestrating agile, user-centric business processes across your enterprise applications. With Oracle Application Integration Architecture, organisations can:

• Gain business and IT efficiencies
• Increase Agililty
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership

With Oracle Application Integration Architecture, organisations can leverage a complete set of tools, templates, and methodologies to do more with their existing IT investments, provide IT with more flexibility and choices, and lower the total cost of ownership.

So, basically it’s a technology for integrating business systems in a standard, well defined manner using Oracle’s extensive investment in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technologies. To help “jump start” your integration project, Oracle provide a number of “Process Integration Packs” which are pre-built, end-to-end business process integrations that connect specific Oracle and non-Oracle applications.

In AIA Release 2.5 Oracle have added a PIP that is of great interest to the Projects community:

Project Management: Oracle Primavera to the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Primavera to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne – provides seamless integration between the two and Oracle Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management. This allows users to create projects in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle Project Portfolio Management or P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management and synchronise project structures, activities, resource details and assignments, budgets, actual costs, progress and cost to complete.

This seems like a very good starting point, but Barry Crawley (our Solution Design Director and Projects Functional consultant) tells me that to be a complete integration it ought to include:

• Financial Plans (although this may be covered above under “budgets”)
• Key Members (this may be covered by “resource details”)
• Planning Resource Lists

In summary, the Oracle Application Integration Architecture with the various cross-industry and industry-specific Process Integration Packs looks like it will be a good way to integrate an organisation’s disparate business systems, using standards based technologies. Implementing AIA to integrate EBS and Primavera or JDE will be a good way to introduce SOA into an organisation. SOA is now seeing very rapid growth and is the technology that underpins Fusion Applications, so moving to AIA now may give you a head start as you change from using “systems” to integrating and orchestrating “services”.

29 Oct, 2009 by Barry Goodsell

E-Business Suite