Financial Governance for Microsoft Project Server 2010
UMT Project Essentials brings together the leading PPM capabilities of Microsoft Project Server 2010 with easy to use financial governance to help organizations quickly deploy workflows and gain control across project and portfolio expenditure.
Quickly create new and update existing workflows with an easy-to-use visual Workflow Editor. Add the required Stages into the Workflow Editor and simply re-order with drag and drop capabilities. The flexible solution empowers non-technical resources to build and publish Project Server 2010 workflows.
Simply drill down into each Workflow Stage to configure the business logic required to automate each transition. Flexible branching ensures you can define simple sequential Stage transitions (e.g. move from Initiate Stage to Select Gate) or automate complex transitions based on approval decisions, custom field values or results of the portfolios analyses (e.g. move from Select Checkpoint to Plan Stage or Rejected Stage).
Quickly standardize global hierarchal cost and benefit structures across the organization to facilitate enterprise reporting. Easily select the required nodes from the global structures and create cost and benefit templates which in-turn are linked to Enterprise Project Types (EPTs). Seamlessly integrate financial governance controls within existing project workflows to enhance accountability and meet regulatory standards.
Simply capture time-phased cost and benefit estimates during the development of a project’s business case. UMT Project Essentials fully integrates with the new demand management infrastructure in Microsoft Project Server 2010. Project Managers and business analysts can capture financial information at the required level of detail in the financial structures and the data is automatically spread across lower time granularities (e.g. year, quarter and month). The robust financial estimates and metrics can then be used to drive the portfolio optimization analysis.
Easily breakdown financial budget, actual and forecast data to support organizational budgeting, allocation and charge backs. Using UMT Project Essentials cost centers / codes organizations can reconcile the worlds of project and organizational accounting. Both project level and task level cost information can be mapped back to one or more funding sources throughout the life of the initiative.
Effortlessly create versions of the financial estimates and compare and contrast as project’s move through the life cycle. Financial versions can be automatically triggered when projects move between stages in the workflow or manually created by users with appropriate rights. Capturing versions ensures that you can quickly see how the cost estimates evolve, keep records for audit purposes and even restore previous versions if needed.
Flexibility to support both top down and bottom up budgeting and tracking. UMT Project Essentials provides the flexibility to manually enter high level or detailed financial data in a top down “Cost Plan” or simply sync and aggregate resource assignment costs (i.e. human, cost and material) from the Project schedule.
Effectively measure and track project cost performance by period (e.g. month, quarter, year). Project managers can quickly complete financial status reports (e.g. actual and forecast data) by period, view real time variances, submit for approval and access past reporting periods to assess trends.
Utilize familiar Microsoft Business Intelligence capabilities (e.g. Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, and Visio Services etc.) to quickly build powerful reports and dashboards to provide Project Financial Intelligence. UMT Project Essentials includes dedicated reporting cube that provides easy access to time phased cost and benefit data.
Successfully track realized benefits and easily compare and contrast with the estimated benefits documented in the initiative’s business case. UMT Project Essentials provides organizations with the tools to track actual benefit and answer a simple question; did the initiative realize the planned benefits?.