Resources are the labor, services, materials, equipment, and other items needed to plan, track, complete, and account for project work. In Oracle Projects, you can define and utilize resources to:

• Plan work
• Staff projects
• Estimate budgets and forecasts
• Assign tasks, issues, and change requests
• Track and report project costs and categorize revenue
• Schedule assignments and monitor the project progress
• Charge labor and expenses to a project containing employees and contingent workers

This chapter covers the following topics:

1. Overview of Resources
2. Planning Resource Lists
3. Resource Breakdown Structure

Overview of Resources
Resources can be people, equipment, or anything else that are essential to complete a project successfully.

People Resources
People resources enable you to plan, manage, and control the work and collaboration required to complete a project. You use them to build your project teams. Oracle Projects supports the following types of people resources:

• Employees: persons employed by the deploying enterprise
• Contingent workers: persons contracted by the deploying enterprise
• External team members: person contacts or employees of a customer or a partner organization.

The following table lists some common activities in Oracle Projects and specifies whether or not the different types of people resources can conduct each activity:

Employees
Oracle Projects obtains information for employees from Oracle Human Resources. The integration with Oracle Human Resources includes:

•  Business group definition, including the specification of the Project Burdening Hierarchy
• Job definitions
•  Organization, organization hierarchies and organization types and definitions
•  Entry and inquiry of employees and employee assignments, including date-effective assignments over time and specification of supervisors and billing titles (used in Oracle Projects) on the employee assignments

Contingent Worker
A contingent worker is a non-employee people resource who works for your enterprise, and for whom your enterprise is responsible for their costs and expenses. Similar to employees, Oracle Projects obtains information for contingent workers from Oracle Human Resources.

Oracle Projects enables you to define and utilize contingent workers on projects in the same capacities and manner as employees. You can define requirements and perform searches for contingent worker candidates, and you can directly assign contingent workers to projects and tasks.

Contingent workers can enter timecards via preapproved batches or Oracle Time and Labor. You can optionally set up Oracle Projects to calculate contingent worker labor costs based on the rates defined in the purchase orders you create to procure contingent worker services.
Note: To calculate contingent worker labor costs based on the cost rates prescribed in purchase orders, you must enable the Import Contingent Worker Timecards with Purchase Order Integration implementation option.

To facilitate processing of contingent worker expenses, you can optionally allow contingent workers to enter their expenses directly in Oracle Internet Expenses, or via Microsoft Excel expense entry and preapproved batches in Oracle Projects. You can also require the enterprise responsible for providing contingent worker services to invoice you for these expense costs and process the expense invoices in Oracle Payables.

To distinguish contingent worker labor and expense costs from employee costs, you can define AutoAccounting rules to separately account for contingent worker costs. As with other project costs, you can view the details of contingent worker labor and expense costs via Expenditure Inquiry, Project Status Inquiry, Project Performance Reporting, and in Discoverer workbooks.

External Team Members
An external team member is a contact or employee from a customer or partner organization. The person can have an assigned role on a project - can be a stakeholder or can be an interested party. You cannot track time or cost for external team members.
An external team member is considered to be a part of the project team. To add an external team member to a project, you first have to enter the customer or partner organization on the project.

Oracle Projects retrieves external team members from Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA). Oracle Trading Community Architecture is a data model that allows you to manage complex information about parties, or customers who belong to your commercial community, including organizations, locations, and the network of hierarchical relationships among them.