Earned Value Management Re-imagined—Solution Brief
Customer success
Burns and McDonnell upgraded to Unifier, improving their project management information systems (PMIS) with new business processes for forecasting, earned value, document management, and ERP integrations.
Key benefits
Oracle’s Primavera Unifier EVM capability delivers:
- Streamlined governance, change management, and cost control processes
- Better understanding of the key dimensions of project progress and performance
- Integrated analytics, program control, and program execution capabilities, while enabling greater precision in forecasting cost and timeline
ABC’s of EVM
- Planned value (PV): the budgeted cost of work scheduled to date
- Actual costs (AC) of the work performed so far, which typically are accumulated via the project accounting system
- Earned value (EV): the budget cost of work performed to date
EVM compliance
In June of 1998, the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) created 32 guidelines for applying EVM to projects and published them with the Electronics Industry Alliance (EIA), EIA-748-1998. At that time, it was also published as an ANSI standard.
In 2005, NDIA published an update to the guidelines as EIA 748-B and there is no longer a corresponding ANSI standard.
Integration of Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management application with Oracle’s Primavera Unifier enables reporting that demonstrates EIA 748-B compliance.
Earned value management (EVM) is not a new concept—its origins date back to the mid-1960s. Yet, in the ensuing five decades, project and program managers have struggled to fully embrace EVM as an effective way to measure project progress and performance. Instead, it’s often viewed as a “check-the-box” exercise required primarily for public sector projects.
Times are changing. EVM is poised to realize its full potential as a powerful tool for managing future risk and delivering more successful projects for contractors and owners. The key to this evolution: fully integrated cost, schedule, and plan or work breakdown structure (WBS) data—and the ability to effectively analyze the combined impact of these variables. Oracle Construction and Engineering’s EVM solution, which is powered by Primavera Unifier, is leading the way.
Flip the Paradigm: EVM as an Asset Versus Requirement
Organizations across diverse industries face a common set of challenges when it comes to large, complex projects: multi-year budgets that encompass numerous funding sources, thousands of contractors and subcontractors, and schedules with thousands of tasks that evolve daily. Public sector entities often feel this pain most acutely due to the vast scale of many government programs.
EVM can and should be an ideal methodology in both the public and private sector for effectively identifying variances in projects based on work performed versus work planned. Creating and managing a baseline for performance management is fundamental to the EVM methodology. Building this baseline requires unified accounting, scheduling, control, and plan data. For decades, however, organizations have struggled to aggregate this data efficiently, accurately, and cost effectively, with the process requiring significant manual intervention.
EVM enables project managers to measure performance. It also can provide a foundation for corrective action and risk mitigation—which is a game changer. Advanced analytics, integrated with EVM capabilities, are the key to flipping the paradigm from EVM as a tedious requirement to a prized asset for industries such as energy, infrastructure, aerospace and defense, and beyond.
Primavera Unifier: World class project controls software.
Better Outcomes with Oracle’s Solution for EVM
Oracle Construction and Engineering, a leader in project and portfolio management solutions, understands organizations’ perennial EVM pain points (one of Primavera’s founders literally wrote the book on EVM*). Just as important, we understand its potential to drive better project outcomes. Oracle’s EVM solution unifies cost, schedule, and plan data, and extends insight with powerful analytics capabilities. Our solution brings new levels of insight and efficiency to EVM processes.
Our EVM capability leverages a preconfigured integration of Primavera Unifier, a highly configurable project controls platform, and Oracle planning and scheduling application Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (Primavera P6 EPPM). This integration synchronizes resources, roles, and activities—giving organizations the comprehensive view of project performance they need.
Specifically, the EVM capability within Primavera Unifier allows you to leverage data from Primavera P6 EPPM to:
- Import multiple projects from Primavera P6 EPPM into a single Primavera Unifier project activity sheet, creating a consolidated view of costs and earned value. The EVM capability in Primavera Unifier incorporates resource spreads and progress information from Primavera P6 EPPM schedule data
- Create rate sheets by resource and role with escalating rates, as well as break down rates by direct and indirect costs. Users also can create rate sheets at a company or project level and establish a mirror of Primavera P6 EPPM projects within Primavera Unifier through the activity sheets. This allows project teams to assign different rates to each Primavera P6 EPPM project and even to specific project baselines
- Pull data from the activity sheet into the EVM module, which will display industry-standard dashboards that include critical project metrics, such as historical trending
In addition, users of Primavera Analytics can import their EVM data to gain additional insights from their Primavera P6 EPPM and Primavera Unifier data.
An Integrated View of Performance Improves Outcomes
By connecting directly to your schedule data in Primavera P6 EPPM, Primavera Unifier's EVM solution provides a streamlined process that enables organizations to easily build an integrated picture of project progress encompassing cost, scope, and schedule to fulfill requirements.
Oracle empowers leaders to focus on analysis and proactive decision-making, rather than data gathering. The end result: more successful project outcomes.
*Earned Value Project Management, Quentin W. Fleming and Joel W. Koppelman, 1996
Ready to take control of cost overruns and effectively manage risk?
Contact us to learn about Oracle’s EVM Solution, Primavera Unifier