What's New With Primavera Unifier 16.2

It is that time of year again where we celebrate the harvest and look forward to the latest release of Oracle Primavera. Once again the Oracle Construction and Engineering teams have got some great new improvements in Primavera 16.2 for us.

On the Unifier side they are working hard to make Unifier easier to administer, easier to integrate with, easier to load documents into and easier to get reports out.

Administering – Configuration Packages

(THANKS – THIS WILL SAVE US ALL A LOT OF TIME. WE LOVE IT!)

When building your Business Processes (BPs) with workflows it was not always easy to move them from staging to production, particularly with many of them depending on others. You needed to move them all at once or they would not go. Not only that, it was not easy to share them between teams and organizations in other Unifier environments. This has been streamlined considerably in the improved configuration packages. Also, many of the OOTB unifier components like Funding Sheets, Cost Sheets and Schedule of Values (SOV) have been added to these, so you can move your setups. In addition, seeing what workflows were actually used was not easy, now we can do that so we are better equipped to understand what workflows are useful throughout the organization.

Excellent changes and much needed, we love it and our clients are going to love it too.

Integrating – Unifier Gateway Providers

In the Primavera SaaS Cloud the main integration platform is the Gateway tool. Gateway providers need to be built to allow you to push/pull Unifier data. Since everyone’s Unifier can be very unique, making these providers was not easy, it took a lot of time and could only be done by Oracle with the backend keys. In 16.2 the Gateway providers are made automatically when a new BP is deployed and the user has the ability to go and make edits, now using the objects to control the flow of data much more readily. This should make integrating with other tools such as your ERP or the IoT and Big Data Analytics much easier.

Document Management – AutoVue

Document management in Unifier is really strong, but was a bit time consuming to work with and required a lot of clicking and digging around. In v16.2 the ability to review all attachments on a document is significantly streamlined. Loading documents is also a lot easier. Collecting markups from AutoVue and seeing them is much easier. Of course this is also REST compliant, so moving data out after a project is done and into a corporate document management system is very doable, so is integrating it into another tool like OpenText Livelink.