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Articles in Category: Case Studies

P6-QA Helped Critique Large P6 Schedule

P6-QA helped to quickly review and critique a 600 million dollar project schedule

Identified Leads, Lags, and Constraints in a P6 Schedule

Client Overview

When running a large, multi-use building project in the middle of New York City, planning and scheduling is not a nice to have. As a specialty developer, having a P6 scheduling expert is a luxury the project could not afford. So P6-QA SaaS was a great fit for a quick review and critique of the 600 million dollar project schedule.

Challenges

  • Reviewing an 8,000+ activity schedule when you do not have a P6 scheduling export on the team

  • Giving critique on the critical path and the project workflow by discipline

  • Understanding the real gaps in the schedule and how to discuss the improvements needed in an intelligent manner

Results

  • In less than 2 hours, the P6-QA tool ran and gave the open ends

  • In less than 2 hours, P6-QA helped with the explanation and write-up of the critical path

  • Identified leads, lags, and constraints and reported on them in minutes

  • The coding structure required to see the disciplines and key building areas tied to major project turnover milestones for the retail space, the hotel space, and the condominium towers was achieved with little pre-knowledge of the project

PCM-Archiver Saved Client Hours of Manual Work

Learn how the PCM-Archiver helped a client with PCM data extraction.

PCM-Archiver Extracted Project Documents from PCM in Days Rather Than Weeks

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Client used Primavera Contract Management on several large, multi-year transportation projects with the Department of Transportation of Connecticut. Part of the contract deliverables was all the project documentation.

Challenges

  • Delivering the project paperwork to the client was a contract commitment and needed to be performed

  • Extracting all the project documents from PCM would take weeks to do manually

  • Thousands of documents were in each project

Results

  • Had to work through a few field size issues on the extracts and clashing with Windows limitations

  • Extracted thousands of documents in a few days

  • Delivered a complete zip package to the client that does not depend on any specific software

  • Created a new form in PCM to include some important information that was excluded from the existing forms.

  • Restored customer data into a PCM environment constructed specifically for archiving as the client's environment was offline and could not be recovered.

  • Modified PCM Archiver to include Letters.

PCM-Archiver Saved 7 Years of Server Maintenance

Learn how the PCM-Archiver helped client extract data out of PCM

In a few weeks, all data was moved to a shared cloud

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Client is a large contractor that used PCM for many years. They have an old server with projects still on it that they wanted to decommission, so they reached out to get PCM-Archiver SaaS to extract these projects and put them into their cloud storage for the required 7 year financial auditing requirements.

Challenges

  • Have old projects in PCM that need to stay live for 7 years for financial auditing

  • Have not used the server for a few years and cannot remember how to use it

  • Want to keep data more readily available

Results

  • After a few technical challenges to start, we were able to archive all the projects in one day

  • Team can easily access information - no need to be a PCM Expert

  • Can put the files into the cloud common repository

  • They were able to turn off an old Windows server

Recover from P6 Data Loss with the P6-Auditor

P6-Auditor helped a large oil company recover from P6 data loss

Report on P6 Data Changes

Client Overview

The client is a Canadian integrated energy company that specializes in the production of synthetic crude from the oil sands. They have been a pioneer in the development of technologies for oil sands extraction and upgrading processes, and are considered a prominent player in Canada's energy sector.

Challenges

  • Resources and code dictionaries were being incorrectly modified in the Primavera P6 database

  • Projects were being removed from the database

  • EPS nodes were being moved out of place

  • Uncertainty about how their licenses were being allocated across multiple databases

  • Identify users who needed training and guidance on how to properly use Primavera P6

Results

  • Focus training on users who needed it

  • Determine active users in Primavera P6 and license distribution

  • When a deletion of activity code types occurred, company was able to recover quickly from the data loss

Global Engineering Consultant Enhances P6 Usage

Learn how Emerald's tools are enhancing this Engineering Consulting Company's use of P6

P6-Loader and P6-Auditor provide the means to Enhance P6 Usage

Written by Sue Hopkins

Client Overview

Power Engineers is a global consulting engineering firm that offers complete and multi-discipline engineering, architecture and program management services.

Challenges

  • Power Engineers needed a way to easily administer multiple P6 databases and also update many projects on each update cycle.

  • Administration challenges were maintaining users and user profiles, and global data like activity codes.

  • On the updating side, updating actual costs and maintaining cross project relationships between contractor and owner schedules after each update cycle was really time consuming and error prone.

  • Administrators needed an effective way to view audit information in multiple databases for their large user base.

Results

  • One administrator is able to handle all user and codes maintenance for 10+ databases.

  • P6-Loader allows the team to continue to cost load much more quickly each month.

  • Handling cross project relationships is much less error prone now after receiving XERs from contractors on each update; it is a simple extract logic, change the project reference and reload!

  • The project controls team is able to tackle problems that they could not prior.

  • P6-Auditor has allowed them to keep a finger on the pulse of their schedules and gives them a means for disaster recovery.

From Our Customer

"P6-Loader enables me to do things that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do. It facilitates the ability to tackle problems that the infrastructure doesn't support. P6-Loader has been a quality and service enhancement."

John Moorman - Project Control Manager

Large US Oil Company Implements P6-Loader and TAPS

One refinery using TAPS and P6-Loader saw great improvements in speed and accuracy when working with P6 data that the company rolled out the tools to all refineries.

Simplify the STO process from beginning to end

Client Overview

Client is an oil and gas company with a focus in refining and marketing petroleum products, processing natural gas and gas liquids, and manufacturing petrochemicals, polymers, and plastics.

Challenges

  • The Planners wanted to add information to their schedules in an easy way using information provided in spreadsheets.

  • The Washington state refinery was seeking to simplify and accelerate the input of progress.

  • The contracted master scheduler at the Ferndale Refinery had used P6-Loader and TAPS before and knew the tools would simplify their STO processes.

Results

  • TAPS was initially used at the Ferndale Refinery and saved so much time, it is used on turnarounds at all the company’s refineries now.

  • After using P6-Loader at the Ferndale refinery, the tool was purchased company-wide for use with all P6 databases.

Large Engineering Firm Moves to EAI Hosting

Learn how a large engineering firm moved to the Emerald Cloud.

Emerald Cloud, Tools and Services - A Winning Combo

Written by Sue Hopkins

Client Overview

Client is an employee-owned multi-disciplined engineering, planning, architectural, and environmental services firm in the United States. With nearly 700 employees spread between more than 30 offices in 12 states, they offer a wide range of services with a focus on aviation, construction, facilities design, federal, power, transportation, survey, and water. They sit in the top 150 of the Engineering News-Record's prestigious Top 500 Design Firms list, while Zweig Group has recognized client as a best firm to work for in the multi-discipline category for six consecutive years.

Challenges

  • Client was looking for an alternative to the Oracle Cloud for them and the Department of Transportation (DOT) they were working with.

  • The Program Controls manager wanted faster response time on support tickets for four databases.

  • Needed a reliable environment for 80+ DOT users to fulfill their contract commitments.

Results

  • Moved hosting of four databases to the Emerald Cloud.

  • Decreased supported response time from days to hours

  • Able to bring their DOT client online with their environment in less than two months, including upgrade of P6 and rollout of new business processes.

  • Added a second DOT client to Emerald's hosting environment two years later.

TAPS - Reduce Stress, Improve Forecasting

TAPS helped turnarounds run smoother and with less stress.

Scanning made all the difference

Client Overview

As an international integrated Oil and Gas organization from Vienna, Austria, previously listed as one of the 500 largest public companies in the world, large turnaround projects are second nature; however, getting updates and forecasting done is still a challenge.

Challenges

  • Updating thousands of activities within 2 hours of a shift change.

  • Ensuring a simple forecasting at the end of the shift to get the next crew lead to status this to complete.

  • Knowing what inspections were needed.

  • Getting the crews to the right place for efficiency.

Results

  • The New Zealand group got TAPS at the recommendation of the Engineering leads, and this has been great for them. With TAPS, the updating process was much more smooth and painless.

  • The team had a lot less stress to deal with, and reporting was simplified.

  • Accurate forecasting went up significantly.

  • The turnarounds have been smoother on the impact analysis.

  • Better mitigation of work area access.

TAPS at Suncor Energy

Discover how Suncor Energy harnessed Emerald Associates' TAPS to reduce their scheduling costs while boosting their speed.

TAPS makes updating faster and easier

Client Overview

Suncor Energy is a Canadian integrated energy company based in Calgary, Alberta. It specializes in the production of synthetic crude from the oil sands.

Challenges

  • Updating schedules was incredibly slow

  • Updating schedules was inaccurate

  • The schedulers they had to hire were expensive and in high-demand

  • Early shifts were needed to get updates in on time

Results

  • 3x faster progress entry into schedule

  • Updating schedules was much more accurate and efficient when the human component was taken out

  • Less skilled resources could be used - can use entry clerks and foremen instead of the more expensive schedulers

  • A lot of money was saved

  • Decided to implement TAPS throughout their multiple refineries

From Our Customer

“We have used this system for progressing Primavera scheduled activities for three turnarounds now, and I and everyone who has used it for updating are most favorably impressed with the speed and accuracy achieved. What used to take an experienced user 1½ to 2 hours to update manually, can now be done in ½ to ¾ of an hour and can be done accurately by a less experienced user.”

Lead TA and Construction Scheduler, Suncor Energy

Safran Risk Implementation and Training

Safran Risk is selected for it's robust cost and schedule integration.

EEI Corporation Implements Safran Risk for Their Team

Client Overview

EEI Corporation is recognized as one of the leading construction companies in the Philippines, known for the quality of its work and the excellence of its workforce. It has the broadest range of construction and engineering services, with expertise in the construction of large-scale heavy and light industrial projects, infrastructure, and property development projects all over the world. Over the years, EEI has built several power plants, refineries, petrochemical plants, cement plants, mining facilities, industrial plants, buildings, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, seaports, airports, railways, water distribution stations, flood control systems, steel structures and modular assemblies.

Challenges

  • Need Risk Analysis capability

  • Need integrated cost and schedule risk analysis

  • Training of users needed to be done remotely due to COVID-19

Results

  • Implemented OPRA (Oracle Primavera Risk Analysis) then upgraded to Safran Risk

  • Safran Risk has robust cost/schedule integration

  • Emerald ran Safran Risk online training for the users

From Our Customer

"Speaking on behalf of my team, Safran is really an exceptional product - it is a very powerful and useful tool for us. As for Ian [Nicholson], he is among the best that we've had...a knowledgeable planner, risk analyst and Safran operator."

Derick Duron

P6-Calculator and P6-Reporter Makes Power BI Reporting a Breeze

Major North Eastern utility company uses P6-Reporter and P6-Calculator to improve their reporting.

regulatory metrics management

Client Overview

Major North Eastern utility using P6 to plan transmission and distribution maintenance and projects. The team needed to improve their ability to ensure that regulatory deliverables were being met while managing the deliverables in a more balanced and consistent manner.

Challenges

  • With hundreds of projects on the go across several states with different regulatory reporting requirements, setting standards across the team for consolidated management reporting was needed

  • Ensuring that regulatory commitment dates are met within the month, quarter and year was critical but very time consuming to manage

  • Giving the P6 scheduling team a quick way to find missing P6 information for coding and tracking milestone commitment dates was needed

Results

  • Using P6-Calculator to flag and count key in-service milestones within P6 and then snapshotted for use within Power BI

  • P6-Loader was used to cleanup manually created data that was used in the reporting to set up standards

  • P6-Reporter automatically snapshotted the reports every Monday at 8am to give management current reports for the weekly status meeting

  • P6-Calculator did automatic quarterly and monthly flagging for easy data validation across P6 and Power BI

  • Produced overall project metrics, in-service monitoring, construction readiness, and scheduling team production reporting

  • P6-Auditor allows for ongoing metrics for schedule performance on update counts to avoid bottlenecks and back dating tasks

CAPPS - Struggling Interproject Dependencies

Project Managers do some of the heavy-lifting to lighten the project controls team workload.

Weekly updating of OPEX and CAPEX projects in an Operational Plant

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

When you are working in an operational plant with daily maintenance, small upgrade projects and major expansion capital projects all going on at once, it is critical to manage schedule inter-dependencies and potential impacts so that nothing goes off the rails.

Challenges

  • Reporting weekly progress and monthly costs to date on over 50-100 projects

  • Reviewing inter-dependencies, schedule impacts, and coordinating crews with area holds

  • Balancing the project controls teams' overtime each week and at the end of the month

  • Ensuring interproject critical path analysis was done

  • Getting updates from remote engineering firms in different time zones

Results

  • With CAPPS, weekly status updates were done by the project managers and submitted to the project controls team for approval in P6

  • Monthly cost updates and forecasting of EAC were done by the project managers and submitted to the project controls team for approval in P6

  • Key management milestone reporting was streamlined significantly

  • Project controls teams were freed up to deal with larger turnaround projects

  • Project controls teams were able to focus on P6 re-scheduling and critical path analysis

CAPPS Updating Major Infrastructure Projects

CAPPS was used on large infrastructure projects to help with timely updates.

weekly updates with costs and resources

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Founded in the early 1900s, the client provides a wide array of engineering and consulting services throughout the United States, known for its range of services, industry expertise, and commitment to delivering innovative solutions.
Running large infrastructure projects that are highly time sensitive requires easy updating of P6 project schedules. This is not easy to do when you have highly specialized suppliers and contractors scattered around North America.

Challenges

  • Timely updates from multiple specialty engineering, suppliers and contractors

  • Weekly status reporting including costs to date and estimate at completion

  • Updating resource usage and forecasting on a weekly basis from over 15 specialty suppliers

Results

  • CAPPS was deployed to key project managers and suppliers

  • Weekly updates were prepared and reviewed in meetings prior to submission to keep the communication flowing smoothly

  • Used percent complete, resource usage and cost to date

  • Reporting improvement and better forecasting was achieved

CAPPS Makes Updating Hundreds of Projects Easy

Remote PMs get updates in on time with CAPPS

Remote Project Managers get updates in on time

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

When managing a multi-million, country-wide building upgrade and retrofit program with over 150 project managers, getting timely updates is very challenging.

Challenges

  • Getting bi-weekly status updates from 150 remote project managers was taking over a week to accomplish

  • Capturing monthly costs in a timely manner to get the program reporting reviewed and validated without major overtime for the project controls team

  • Ensuring consistent updating of key milestones and schedule slippage analysis

  • Getting all PMs to take responsibility for the updates and the timelines and understanding inter-project dependency impacts

Results

  • P6-Loader was used to clean up project templates for some 500 projects in play to acquire consistency

  • CAPPS is used for weekly updates by over 150 PMs

  • The project controls teams review and approve all updates in P6 and discuss any anomalies with the PMs right away

  • CAPPS is allowing meeting updates to run more efficiently with the on-screen grid

  • Program management reporting is now being done with a lot less stress and overtime

  • P6-Calculator allows for flagging of variances and easy filtering of late and overdue items for the schedulers to find across hundreds of projects

Large US Refinery Implements Emerald Tools

Learn how this refinery used P6-Loader and TAPS to improve accuracy and speed when working with data in their P6 schedules and how they used EP-datawarehouse and custom dashboards to help with cost control and management visibility for their turnarounds.

Cost controls more effective and schedule updating more streamlined

Written by Sue Hopkins

Client Overview

Client is one of North America's largest integrated energy companies. Their Lima refinery was looking for a way to improve their turnarounds and create custom dashboards for better visibility for management.

Challenges

  • Their Lima refinery was looking for a way to have more effective cost controls for their turnarounds.

  • They needed a way to streamline data entry and schedule updating and reporting.

Results

  • Emerald's Turnaround Productivity Package - TAPS, P6-Loader, EP-dashboard, and P6-Reporter (previously EP-datawarehouse) was implemented

  • Schedule updates are now completed in less than a quarter of the time. Updating takes a matter of minutes using TAPS, rather than several hours

  • P6-Loader streamlined the addition of found work to both the working schedule and the baseline schedule

  • P6-Reporter is used to store snapshotted data for multiple uses for EV and Trending

  • EP-dashboards utilize the snapshot data to create custom dashboards for management including Green-Ups, Inspections and S-Curves

From Our Customer

"Coming in at 6am instead of 4am each day made a big difference to our team; not only on a daily basis but by not being exhausted at the end of the turnaround. TAPS saved 600 grueling hours.”

-Ken Admire, Lead Planner/Scheduler