Primavera P6 EPPM Plans
Late December 2011 saw the release of Oracle Primavera P6 EPPM 8.2 and it’s certainly been living up to its promise of improved performance and usability over the earlier R8 versions. Now that we’re well into Q3 of 2012, you may want to know what new releases we’ll see this year and understand the strategic plan for Primavera P6 EPPM going forward.
Strategic Plans
It’s clear that Oracle Primavera’s strategy continues to emphasize greater integration of business management modules across the board. Yasser Mahmud, Oracle’s Vice President for Product Strategy & Industry Marketing recently delivered a presentation at the Collaborate 12 Conference in Las Vegas called ‘Oracle Primavera: Today & Tomorrow’. He described the strategy as “complete, integrated, modular and verticalized” with greater Project Management participation. The vision is a single solution that provides for the entire spectrum of the organization.
Simply put, it will integrate modules used by departments across the entire organizational breakdown structure. And the strategy doesn’t stop at the desktop computer. Primavera Anywhere promises more apps for your portable devices too.
For 2012 we can expect to see Primavera P6 EPPM R8.3 somewhere around early Q4, although no specific dates are being revealed right now. According to the presentation, this version will offer the following improvements:
Team Member Tools
Enhancements to the Team Member Web interface will enable additional options for sharing information between team members and the Project Manager. Similar improvements will be available in the Team Member Phone App. There are also plans to support other mobile platforms, but it’s not clear if this will be part of the 8.3 initial release.
Primavera P6 Administration
The Primavera P6 administration functions update may include setting default landing pages for users, to include user views when copying a user, automatic notification when a job service completes and job service project filtering options.
User Interaction
There are some nice user interaction improvements to look forward to related to sort criteria, filtering, pick lists, activity codes, detail tabs and printing. Some of these items have long been considered a shortfalls by Primavera P6 Professional users and will be a welcome addition to EPPM.
Next Year’s Primavera P6 EPPM
Sometime in 2013 we should start looking out for Primavera P6 EPPM 9.0. According to the Roadmap we can expect to see a new module called Capitol Portfolio Planning for long-range major project planning and Cost Controls; another new module for the Cost Engineer/Analyst role. We can also expect the release of Primavera Analytics 3.0 with P6 EPPM 9.0.
There’s more going on than we can cover in this article, but we hope this has given you a good feel for some of the exciting things to look forward to in Primavera P6 EPPM plans over the next 18 months.
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