Oracle Primavera Unifier

Client Background

John Wayne Airport, located 35 miles south of Los Angeles, between Costa Mesa, Irvine, and Newport Beach, is a commercial service airport owned and operated by the County of Orange.

Project Overview

Having successfully utilized Oracle Primavera Unifier to manage the $543M airport improvement initiative, John Wayne Airport the airport was interested in continuing the use of Oracle Primavera Unifier and expanding its use for all of its capital improvement program projects, small and large under this single system. The decision was made to merge all of the business processes under Unifier in 2011 and JOA Group joined the project in March 2014. In addition, John Wayne Airport chose to upgrade to the latest Oracle Primavera Unifier version available. However, this was not without it’s challenges and all of the airport’s information needed to be transferred from a SQL server to an Oracle Redstack server before the upgrade.

Our Role

JOA Group has been providing services to John Wayne Airport since 1997. JOA Group’s current role with John Wayne Airport is that of Project Manager. Project management services provided were oversight, planning, design, environmental, bid and construction phases of a CIP project. Construction management services include onsite field representation, change order management, document control, security, and safety compliance.

Beginning in 2012, JOA Group partnered with Oracle Primavera Unifier on John Wayne Airport’s Enterprise Organization Project. JOA Group provides ongoing training, support, business workflow process design, creates dashboards and reports, as well as system documentation. Cost estimating services include preparing independent cost estimates for contracts and change orders. JOA Group’s experience with key stakeholders such as: the FAA, Caltrans, OC Public Works, TSA, OC Sheriff, OCFA, MCWD, Costa Mesa Sanitary District, Southern California Edison, City of Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and Irvine, JWA Facilities, Operations, Business Development, Public Affairs, County Counsel, Finance and Administration, Santa Ana Heights PAC, Airlines, Air Cargo, FBOs and Concessionaires, was invaluable in achieving project success. JOA Group successfully aligned the various stakeholders, trained team members, and provided documentation for the process.

Project Solutions

• Rolled out updates and changes with an interactive approach
  – Consistent with the Processes Key with John Wayne Airport and Orange County policies and procedures.
• Ensuring the ongoing Unifier data integrity with quality control of data after each hardware upgrade.
• Ensuring functionality of JWA’s system after software upgrades.
• Continual training and support of all users, JWA staff, and contractors
  – Consulted with JWA, PM/CM team stakeholders to determine current and relevant input in developing business processes.
• Developed solid, consistent and documented business processes.
  – Documentation included a complete Unifier User Manual: Documentation of “tailor made permission processes with help files for each individual business processes.

The JOA Group team responsible for the operation and upgrade of Unifier distinguished themselves from the competition by their unique experience and skills:

• In-depth software knowledge and extensive experience with JWA combined with a construction background.
• Management experience that is both deep and relevant to unify varied stakeholders.
• Experience with software transition without interrupting daily business flow.
• Excellent people skills and patience in training and creating user and stakeholder buy-in to implement changes in business processes

Project Challenges

The main challenge of this project was to create a single system of record that enabled project transparency and provided concrete, timely, and accurate data for a robust budget management and control of the capital project. Stakeholder and agency users adopted the changes and the business processes are effectively being used still to this day.