Unlocking Oracle PPM's Full Potential: A CFO's Strategic Leap

Part 1 of 4 | Interview Series: Financial Transformation with Projects Expert 

Interview with the CFO of Life Star, a Global Biopharma Life Sciences Organisation.

In this piece, we talk through a CFO’s experience of adopting Projects Expert’s SaaS solution to enhance their Oracle PPM Cloud experience. Life Star had implemented Oracle Cloud as its Finance and Project solution, but encountered a challenge with the adoption of the Oracle PPM module.

With Projects Expert's help, they rebuilt confidence in the system among key stakeholders and, in the process, rolled out full financial management of Projects across all their Global research and project sites. Our CEO and Founder, Yugwan Mittal, talks to Life Star’s CFO about the journey to project success.

Yugwan: Let’s start with the challenge. Why wasn’t Oracle PPM Cloud delivering what you needed?

CFO: At face value, Oracle PPM Cloud looked like the complete package. However, once our project teams, especially those in R&D, began using it, the gaps became apparent quickly. Our research projects are high-value and intricately structured, tracking linked tasks with dependencies, managing milestone-driven funding, and generating comprehensive reports. Oracle gave us a robust backbone, but managing and updating large-scale project financials became laborious.

We experienced some challenges in the following areas:

• Lack of milestone-based planning

• Complexity of the user interface for Large Projects

• Inability to link Financial Tasks

• Time Consuming Multi-Screen Navigation

People started reverting to spreadsheets, which undermined compliance and financial visibility.

The turning point was when our business leads began to disengage entirely with the tool (PPM). We were losing control and insight at the most critical planning stage.

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Yugwan: Why do you think the business was disengaging?

CFO: Oracle PPM gave us the structure, but not the flexibility. For a research-heavy business like ours, with high-value, heavily regulated projects, the ability to build, update, and manage complex financial plans is critical. But we found ourselves bottlenecked.

Managing project plans in Oracle PPM Cloud requires considerable manual effort. The system lacks support for linking tasks, and its user interface is unwieldy, necessitating multiple clicks to access even basic information. Reviewing large or complex project plans is virtually impossible, making PPM inefficient not only for management but also for effectively visualising large project plans, which are quite common for R&D Projects.

Project owners struggled to keep plans current. Dependencies weren’t easy to manage. And before long, teams were defaulting to spreadsheets. That fragmented oversight made real-time financial insight nearly impossible.

It was disheartening to invest in a top-tier platform but not get the engagement or control we needed.

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Yugwan: Were you hesitant to bring in a third-party solution?

CFO: Definitely. We’ve built our operational stack around Oracle, so bringing in anything external triggers all the usual alarm bells: Will it break our security model? Will it slow us down? Who supports it when something breaks?

The idea of layering another system over Oracle felt risky-until Projects Expert showed us it wasn’t another system. It was more like a native extension.

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Yugwan: So what changed your mind? What made Projects Expert credible?

CFO:  The turning point was how invisible it felt.

Projects Expert integrates so seamlessly that users don’t even realise they’ve moved beyond Oracle. The interface is familiar, the controls are consistent, and it respects our existing Single Sign-On and role-based access policies. There’s no re-training, no re-permissioning. It just works; there is a seamless connection with the Oracle UI that evolves as Oracle releases new features.

And that’s not just skin-deep. They understood the DNA of project-based organisations, from the regulatory environment in life sciences to the governance frameworks in sectors like manufacturing and infrastructure. It wasn’t a sales pitch; it was like talking to someone who’d lived through the same headaches we had.

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Yugwan: When it became time to make a decision, what tipped the balance?

CFO:  It was the combination of usability, insight, and planning power.

• Milestone-driven planning provided tighter alignment between financials and delivery.

• Real-time risk and dependency tracking helped reduce surprises mid-stream.

• From a process efficiency angle, we reduced our project planning time by nearly 40% and eliminated approximately 70% of spreadsheet-based ‘shadow systems’.

For a COO or CFO, that’s gold. You get transparency, accountability, and engagement from your teams. Additionally, it’s scalable, and we are now considering using the tool for non-R&D projects.

The Projects Expert client list was extremely helpful; they have worked with numerous high-profile organisations, including the Bank of England and Deloitte, which made it easier for us to sell Projects Expert internally to the board.

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Yugwan: Looking back, was it worth the risk?

CFO: 100%. Our project teams are engaged again. We’ve moved away from spreadsheet chaos and restored auditability. Financial oversight is stronger, and strategic planning is no longer a matter of guesswork.

I won’t pretend there weren’t tough conversations, especially internally. However, the ROI has been tangible, and we’ve regained our governance confidence. It’s given us a model that’s audit-proof, user-friendly, and forward-looking.

Most importantly, it’s not a workaround. It’s a strategic extension. Projects Expert has helped us derive real value from Oracle PPM, without the cost and chaos of starting over.

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Yugwan: And what about the future- what's next?

CFO: The roadmap is what excites me most. Their AI integration plans-things like predictive planning and automated risk scoring-will take us beyond reactive project management into something much more dynamic.

Whether you're in biotech, aerospace, engineering, or manufacturing, if you're managing large, complex projects and relying on Oracle, this is the tool that unlocks its full potential.

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Final Thoughts

For any CFO or COO weighing up whether to stretch their Oracle stack or bend their processes to fit-this is your middle ground. With Projects Expert, we didn’t compromise. We accelerated.

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Who are Life Star?

Life Star are a Projects Expert Customer, and for the purpose of this article, we have changed the company’s real name to Life Star to retain commercial anonymity.

As this transformation story illustrates, organisations like Life Star - a global immunology company with over 1,500 employees and operations spanning Europe, the US, and Asia are setting the pace for innovation in the life sciences. With a strong commitment to advancing antibody-based therapies for autoimmune diseases, Life Star is not only commercialising approved treatments in over 30 countries, but also actively managing a pipeline of more than 20 late-stage clinical trials.

As an organisation, they have ambitious growth plans, and this is where enabling technologies like Projects Expert play a critical role. In high-stakes, data-intensive environments, success hinges on visibility, control, and agility. For project-driven companies like Life Star, the future will belong to those who can blend rigour with speed, using tools not just to manage projects, but to power decisions.

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What's Next?

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we speak with a Project Accountant/Finance Business Partner about how financial planning transformed from a reactive chore into a proactive advantage.

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About Projects Expert

Projects Expert is the first-of-its-kind Oracle partner that specialises in project-centric enterprise Solutions. We aim to deliver sustainable, robust, and business-friendly Oracle solutions for project-driven organisations.

To know more about what we can do for you, visit our website at www.projectsexpert.com.

Reach out to us at +44 330 330 5154 or drop a note at info@projectsexpert.com