Streamlined payment management improves outcomes for government agencies and their contractors

Local, state, and federal government in Australia and New Zealand are challenged to do more with less as citizens expect them to run existing services and facilities efficiently, respond to a seemingly endless cycle of natural disasters, and maintain aging infrastructure all while managing portfolios of complex, multiyear capital projects.

Due to such a wide remit, government organisations engage with a wide variety of contractors across the lifecycle of their capital projects and facilities management. The contracts for these services can range from transactional and relatively low risk to billion-dollar investments with significant milestone payments and many stakeholders, including their ultimate customers—Australian and New Zealand citizens.

Good contract management is an essential component to assure efficient, ongoing delivery of services and can be distilled to the following elements:

• Contract governance. Establishing the stakeholder engagement mechanisms, oversight arrangements, systems, processes, decision-making and reporting.
• Performance management. Measuring, monitoring, and assessment against agreed performance measures to enable early warning of and response to performance issues. The monitoring and assessment of deliverables to enable acceptance and achieve contract outcomes.
• Supplier relationship management. Establishing collaborative engagement mechanisms with the contractor.
• Contract administration. The administrative activities undertaken to support day-to-day contract activities, meet legislative requirements for records management, and establish an audit trail to meet transparency requirements.

In the complex mix of public-private partnerships required to deliver large capital programs and then operate those assets, duplicate efforts can plague back-office operations. Administrative teams across stakeholder organisations typically use their own ERP or accounting processes to manage the associated contracts, invoicing paperwork, and variation payments.

But such processes often lead to disconnected teams and siloed information, which can create unnecessary manual effort and introduce errors while increasing risk. These include:

• Failure to pay supplier invoices in a timely manner.
• Failure of the supplier to provide correctly rendered invoices.
• Submission by the supplier of an invoice for unforeseen or unapproved additional costs.
• Contract variations degrading value for money.
• Not gathering data to allow determination of whether value for money was achieved.

As a cloud-based collaborative automated payment management platform, Oracle Textura Payment Management builds efficiency while reducing risk for all parties and can be the centrepiece of government-led projects contract management strategy. Government organisations and head contractors easily manage claims, variations and payments to their subcontractors and facilities services providers while adhering to security of payments and construction contracts acts. Oracle Textura provides:

• Streamlined workflows and automation. Improve productivity and accuracy by eliminating the inefficiencies and potential human errors from manual progress claim calculations, variations, and related reviews, approvals, and compliance processes.
• Compliance. Reduce risk with automated compliance workflows, secure document collection, and strong governance and controls around one of your core financial functions.
• Payments. Comply with dates and times required by Security of Payments (SoP) or Construction Contracts (CC) Acts while managing documents and compliance. Offer early payment programs. Automatically calculate, hold, and release retention.
• Collaboration. With everyone using a single collaboration platform, owners, builders, and subcontractors have full visibility into variation, compliance, and payment status and can identify and fix potential issues before they become problems.
• Reporting and analytics. Augment enterprise analytics by adding payment data from Oracle Textura to a data warehouse. Support decisions with reports, dashboards, and analytics delivered to you when and how you want them. Track status and performance with over 90 pre-defined reports, including supplier classification tracking; analyse projects and portfolios; and access the data via your own analytics applications.
• Accounting system integration. Eliminate redundant double data entry and automate the transfer of critical financial data between Oracle Textura and the most popular accounting solutions. Oracle sets up these integrations at no extra charge.
• Integration with Oracle Aconex. Save time with out-of-the box integration connecting Oracle Aconex and Oracle Textura. Eliminate manual steps by automating the transfer of approved claim documents to the head contractors Oracle Aconex document register. It makes sense to use a system that integrates with the project documentation management software head contractors are likely to be using.
• Dedicated client services. You and your subcontractors enjoy dedicated support during implementation and for as long as you use the application. Access unlimited training for all users including subcontractors to shorten time to value.

Our dedicated Australia and New Zealand client services teams will implement Oracle Textura and can set up over a dozen integration points with your accounting system at no extra cost, automating or eliminating up to two-thirds of previously manual steps.

The challenge of continuous procurement

Maintenance of council facilities and assets is often managed by contractors engaged under ongoing procurement contracts or cyclical procurements (as opposed to a standalone contract for capital or infrastructure work). The use of open-ended purchase orders, open or rolling contracts, existing legacy contracts, and “set and forget” estimated budgets heightens the risk of corruption.

Procurements of this type can lead to mismanagement of contingency budgets and repeated use of contract variations. A marked corruption risk of continuous procurements is that they allow longstanding relationships to develop between staff and contractors, which can lead to a decline in supervision. Lapses in supervision also can occur when long-running contracts are managed by a succession of employees.

Oracle Textura provides transparency for all parties by greatly reducing these risks.

Transparency benefits all stakeholders

Government agencies already doing more with less will find that implementing Oracle Textura immediately boosts productivity, builds trust, and improves efficiency and transparency.  

Partner organisations stretched thin get hours back in their day to focus on business and not waste time chasing billings and invoices.

Oracle Textura’s capabilities strengthen security, compliance, and electronic payments, and Oracle’s local customer service makes implementation simple and fast, assuring that things are working right while constantly checking in. That’s extremely helpful when introducing a new software solution.

The Oracle Smart Construction Platform combines our industry-trusted applications with a common data environment and an ecosystem of partners to help owners and delivery teams work together and continuously improve performance. The platform connects teams and data, synchronizes work, and empowers individuals to make informed, proactive decisions. Power performance with proven Oracle Construction and Engineering solutions for scheduling, portfolio management, construction project management, project controls, construction payment management, and more.

Read more about payment process management:

• KBD Group secures its payment management solutions with Oracle Textura
• Four Peaks Building Group is building its business with Oracle Textura
• Oracle Textura helps Alston Construction keep payment processes smooth amid supersonic revenue growth
• Digital Realty aligns its global construction finance processes with Oracle Textura
• Gilbane Building Company pursues a better way of doing things with Oracle Textura