Oracle's integrated platform: a holistic view for teams
Niche solutions, often easy to set up and quick to establish, are tempting to business units and departments when facing their specific challenges. But we're aware these days that digitisation at the strategic level makes it imperative to make full use of the rich data sources available to utilities. Any proliferation of niche products, prompting the adoption of Excel tools to overcome deficiencies in data availability, only serves to undermine the establishment of holistic thinking within a business. It can impede the progress of broader digital evolution, which now more than ever needs to be fast-tracked, and ultimately of project outcomes.
While the use of niche products can be partially resolved with a highly integrated environment, says Oracle Construction and Engineering's director of energy industry strategy Geoff Roberts, those tangled “spider web” approaches deployed to business solutions are a thing of the past. Oracle’s Primavera platform has been available for decades for complex scheduling and resource management but over the last 10 years it has been continually enhanced by acquisitions, moving into the project controls space, until today Oracle has a truly integrated platform with solutions such as Oracle Aconex that enable disparate parts of the supply chain to blend and work effectively. “It is all about business processes, workflow, a two-way flow of information during the life-cycle of the project, from strategic investment planning right through to execution.” he says.
Primavera Unifier supports owner organisations, their project delivery teams, and supply chains to manage their data in a single platform. Primavera Unifier is a purpose-built platform that supports, automates, and tracks project delivery processes through complex workflows. In addition, Primavera Unifier acts as a perfect vehicle to remove Excel from the delivery teams and ensure data visibility and transparency – not only across the project team, but throughout the entire organisation and supply chain. Primavera Unifier also supports mobility, Roberts emphasises, to ensure that any project delivery process, including document reviews/redlining, photo capture and the like, managed remotely through a mobile application can be supported without the need for IT deployment.
A project delivery platform enhances and is highly complementary to an owner organisation’s ERP solution, providing the project team with a vehicle to efficiently deliver projects. A cloud-based platform significantly reduces the need for integration, as well as the software portfolio required, and ensures one common place to manage all project data, ensuring a digital data thread. The Oracle fully integrated solution is further integrated with the entire business ecosystem. “We integrate smoothly with any major ERP system, not just our own!” adds Roberts.
Spurred by necessity in this time of COVID-19 disruption, every company is looking to technology to help it run its business better. Bringing customers and partners together, Oracle is a pioneer with its innovation lab: partners are essential to further enhance Oracle's ecosystem, demonstrating innovations in, for example, IoT in smart materials tracking, vehicle and people management or understanding edge technologies like virtual and augmented reality.
