The Rising Demand for PeopleSoft Integration in the Public Sector
In the past two years Calance has seen a growing demand for integrating PeopleSoft with project controls systems. This demand is particularly noted in the public sector, as public entities are seeking to manage capital projects and programs in more rigorous and accountable ways than the past practice of multiple, unrelated systems and spreadsheets.
There are a myriad of methods for tracking project and program health including: schedules, funding allocations and expenditures, contracts and changes, facilities conditions, and document turnaround times. The tools for tracking such things are also diverse, and include a number of products in the Oracle Primavera family such as Primavera P6, Contract Management (PCM), and Unifier. But the tools also extend to other Oracle products such as Hyperion, other commercial systems such as Maximo, and systems such as home-grown applications and of course the ubiquitous Excel!
This trend to standardize program and project health metrics is driven by demand for more accountability and transparency in the use of public funds. And such accountability and transparently ultimately benefit organizations which are seeking public funding. It is not always easy for public organizations to adapt new tools and practices, but it is essential to their long-term success.
How does Calance fit into this dialog of transition and improvement in the Public Sector? For many years, we have been working with many public entities, helping them to implement and integrate project controls systems, going back to their first work with the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2004. In that project we integrated Primavera Expedition with a home-grown solution, and helped to automate management of P5 (later P6) projects and baselines. Since then we have worked with a number of other school districts, including San Diego and New York, taking best practices and turning them into automated data integrations which improve data quality and turnaround times, while enhancing use of best practices across the organization.
Our in-house product, the Dimension Integration Framework has been fundamental to this success. Dimension allows us to bridge data across multiple systems, not only for data integration, but also for automation of tasks. For example, using Dimension automation, we have streamlined contractor payment processes for clients.
Dimension is a very mature product. First created in 2001 for integrating Primavera with JD Edwards, is has undergone continuous improvements since then to meet the needs of our current customers, adapting far beyond the first systems integrated to include many more. We do not let Dimension sit still, but take advantage of improved technology as software techniques and hardware capabilities advance. Today, Dimension is capable of many things, from performing simple point-to-point field mapping to advanced mapping operations which can handle thousands of active projects across multiple databases. Dimension has also adapted to work with in-house or cloud-based systems, making it ideal for integrating PeopleSoft with the latest project control system from Oracle Primavera - Unifier. But that is a topic for another post.
Until then, may your data serve your organization, not vice versa!
Boulder, CO
Aug 2015
