A Case Study on Implementing Oracle Projects Enterprise Suite in a Large NZ Organisation

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd (NIWA) is a leading Crown Research Institute that is heavily engaged in project work.
NIWA run a large number of inter-disciplinary project teams which manage a diverse range of projects in scientific research and consulting services. There are approximately 1600 projects raised and closed every year with 400 Project Leaders and a revenue of $120M PA.
Since it was formed in 1992, NIWA has grown significantly in size and complexity and with the diverse range of projects, geographical separation of team members and the challenge of tracking and managing them to a successful conclusion beginning to outstrip the capability of the existing largely paper-based project management system.
As a long time user of the Oracle e-Business suite, Project Costing and Billing were business critical applications, the time has arrived for NIWA to assess how the new Oracle Projects Enterprise Suite could be leveraged to provide an integrated solution which could replace and/or enhance current Project Management systems. Asparona was engaged to provide expertise in scoping the project and provide consulting services on implementation of the appropriate solution as a pilot. NIWA upgraded from 11.5.9 to 12.06 earlier in 2009. This paved the way for the impending changes when a decision was made to implement Oracle Project Management, Resource Management, Project Collaboration and Portfolio Analysis.
The Project commenced in January 2010 and will run until May 2010. This presentation will provide insights into the reasons why NIWA started the project,
features of the Oracle projects Enterprise suite, and how the Pilot is proceeding.