Articles in Category: Case Studies

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

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

Integrated Daily Cost Control - Discoverer -> P6, PCM

Integration allows PMs to manage 20 projects at once

PMs get on top of projects with daily integrated system

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Calgary pre-fab manufacturer with international projects needed integration to accounting and purchasing system to get control over client commitments and internal and external spending for hundreds of simultaneous projects.

Challenges

  • Tracking costs to date on hundreds of projects manually was too time consuming

  • Client forecasting was taking too long and overruns were being missed

  • Senior management was not getting the reporting done in a timely manner

Results

  • Integrated daily costs from Discoverer into P6 and PCM Contract Management

  • Updated the external contract and PO costs into expenses

  • Integrated the internal detailed resource costs into resources and forecasted onto the budget resource

  • P6-Calculator did all the cost rollups and comparisons to the budget

  • P6-Calculator flagged integration errors, mismatches, and potential incorrect charges for the PM

  • BI Reporting was developed for cost to date, forecasting, earned value, CPI, SPI and changes to-date

Monitoring Large P6 Groups with P6-Auditor

P6-Auditor helps find users who made mistakes in P6

Deleting and editing global data happens; P6-Auditor can help

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Large Electrical Utility with several P6 databases with internal and external scheduling teams needed a way to manage and report on functions inside P6.

Challenges

  • With a large team of P6 users, it is hard to track down when projects are deleted

  • Ensuring that the EPS does not get changed when users are cutting and pasting projects was a challenge

  • When managing a resource pool of over 10 thousands crews, making sure your resource dictionary is maintained and coding kept up to date with more than one admin can be error prone

Results

  • Tracing project deletes easily and rollbacks if required

  • Reporting on update frequencies - actual starts, actual finishes, and percent completes

  • Edits to the resource dictionary that were not expected including deletes and cut and pastes

  • Verifying changes to activity codes and who made them as well as when they were made

  • Tracing EPS moves that no user admitted to

  • Finding logic changes that should not have been made as well as task deletes

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 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

  • EP-datawarehouse 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

IT Portfolio Management in P6

IT Portfolio Streamlined with PeopleSoft and P6

8 weeks to develop integrated system

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

The client is a large cancer research hospital in California. They use Primavera tools for portfolio and project management across the program management, IT and capital projects teams. The IT team was finding that the system was not giving them the project status and resourcing information they were hoping for. Nor could they ascertain what the resourcing, in-house and outsourced, capacity and efforts were for the short and long-term planning.

Challenges

  • Developing a new project management structure with new projects, upgrade projects and ongoing support work

  • Transparency for resourcing across multiple departments - reworking of roles, resource codes, employee ID from PeopleSoft

  • Overhauling the EPS, OBS, CAS, and WBS templates after completing workshops

Results

  • Led design sessions for changes to global structures, stage gate templates, and consistent deliverables

  • Remapping and migration was done with P6-Loader after each working session so management could see the changes right away

  • Training was delivered by Emerald using custom developed UPK content and small working sessions for the different business leaders and then team project managers

  • Management Dashboard for timesheet submissions, project stage gate and milestones from templates were developed

Integrated E-Business EAM to P6 for Multi-Plant Resource Scheduling

Oracle E-Business EAM Integration to P6

Global Production Management with P6

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

As Canada's largest potash mining organization with over 20 mines in North America, managing global production supply is critical. Planning daily production, weekly short outages and monthly maintenance days while implementing larger capital projects and major shutdowns is very challenging. Using spreadsheets and lists was not working particularly well for production planning and productivity analysis in real time.

Challenges

  • Consistent coordination of Shutdowns and Capital Projects in short work windows while maintaining production and productivity forecasting

  • Detailed scope planning and resource planning across underground and above ground skilled resources

  • Easy updating, forecasting and realtime earned value analysis during the shutdown work and contractor productivity

Results

  • Realtime updates from Oracle E-Business EAM into P6 for Projects, Work Orders, Tasks and Resources allowing for easier plan development for maintenance work, mini-outage work, turnaround work windows and capital programs across several plants

  • Implemented within 6 months including dev, test, QA, and production. P6-Loader was used to move the P6 coding structures, EPS, OBS, codes, UDFs, and resources in a matter of minutes and to maintain these environments.

  • Better analysis of planned resource requirements, spending planning and timeframes across the capital programs throughout the plants

  • Improved delivery on outage deadlines, timeframes and what-if capability particularly related to managing production capacity across the plants

  • Better understanding of mining equipment and productivity rates for improved forecasting. Reduced effort to build the schedules, allowing better management of the short 1-2 power outage windows.

  • P6-Calculator ensured auto-archiving of the projects and work orders to keep the P6 database clean and manageable and to produce rollup data for resources and flagging of integration changes

Moving from SAP to P6

Oil exploration company uses P6-Loader to migrate to Primavera P6 with speed and consistent data.

Proactive Not Reactive Portfolio Planning

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Client is involved in the exploration, development and production of crude oil and gas in Colombia. They had numerous drilling projects that were being managed principally from SAP with difficulty.

Challenges

  • SAP was providing data too late to effectively manage projects

  • Spending overruns were common

  • Rig planning and completions forecasting was not reliable

Results

  • Implemented P6 for planning the drilling program

  • Migrated from SAP report into P6 - used the P6-Loader to load in projects, WBS, and costs

  • Easy visualization and comprehension of the plan in P6

  • Consistent templating of data across the portfolio

  • Saved weeks of data entry

Turnaround Planning with Outsourced Contractors

Large oil and gas company uses P6-Loader to develop turnaround plans.

Moving to consistent processes and reporting

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Large oil plant in Australia needed a more efficient way to develop their turnaround plans. This was typically being done by an outsourced engineering and contractor joint venture every 2 years. So each time different processes and team members were working with different methodologies.

Challenges

  • Struggling to build detailed schedules since they had to pull data from internal systems and contractor inputs and remap the data into standard template formats

  • Working with contractors during the turnaround providing updates in different ways

Results

  • Streamlined data imports by over 30%

  • Drastically reduced manual data entry by 50%

  • Improved standardized reporting during the planning stage and execution

  • Expanding P6-Loader’s use into other groups to improve the usage of P6

From Our Customer

We saved 6 weeks on our planning process, and were able to get feedback more quickly after using P6-Loader.

Moving to the Primavera Cloud Made Easy

Used the P6-Loader to move a client to the Primavera Cloud in two weeks.

In 2 weeks - all projects were ready

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Project Management specialist overseeing a large building remediation program after Hurricane Sandy needed to move from on-premise P6 program development to the Primavera Cloud to share schedule information with Contractors and Owners Representatives.

Challenges

  • Setup a new P6 environment in the Primavera Cloud within 2 weeks

  • Transfer all P6 program data for over 750 projects in a standalone PPM database

  • Over 400 baselines needed to be moved as well

Results

  • Emerald provided P6-Loader aaS

  • Enterprise Data: built and loaded for EPS, OBS, Users, User Profiles

  • Global Data: merged and cleaned up while loading over 400 Resources and 50 Calendars

  • Project Data: 756 projects, 455 Baselines, 265,802 activities. Activity codes, resource assignments, and relationships were all transferred.

  • Approach - used a combination of XER and P6-Loader functionality

  • Saved weeks of manually re-creating global data, users/profiles, and baseline management. Went live 1 week after getting files.

SAP Integrated to P6 with P6-Loader

Large Australian rail company uses the P6-Loader to integrate SAP to Primavera P6.

Monthly cost loading made easy for hundreds of projects.

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Large railway projects need a tremendous amount of coordination and strong scheduling. Managing monthly costs and updates from several regional contractors so that shareholders can be informed of status can be a challenge.

Challenges

  • Gathering updates from contractors working in remote regions to keep forecasting accurate

  • Ensuring costs were captured and validated against the schedule performance

Results

  • Streamlined the efforts of updating down from 4 person weeks to 2 person days. Data Imports by over 30%.

  • Errors and mismatches were reduced significantly

  • Several macros made this extract and upload much more reliable than manual inputs

  • Reloading every day during the update window was smooth

From Our Customer

SAP to P6 updates were easy to perform so that forecasting was much more accurate.

AVEVA->P6 Engineering Document Integration

We integrated Aveva with P6 to drastically reduce the time our client spent updating their capital projects

Simplifying Engineering Updates

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

One of Canada's many potash companies runs all their capital projects with P6. With one scheduler on the team, it is difficult to keep up with the dozens of projects on the go to ensure monthly reporting is accurate.

Challenges

  • Updating some 20+ projects in P6 was time consuming at the end of each month

  • Mid-month reporting was not easy to do without spending extra hours to get all the updates into P6

  • Going over the updates with the extended team took a lot of coordination to schedule with so many people with different schedules

Results

  • Integrated documents statuses from Aveva

  • Templated the different task types and package types with preset calculation methods

  • Documents planned, in progress, completed, deleted

  • Set the start dates of tasks in progress, updated the percent completes and flagged changes to the tasks

  • Updated the resources - actual labor units

Large Energy Company Migrates to Clean P6 Environment

The daunting task of cleaning up 10 years of projects was made easy with P6-Loader so archiving, cleaning, fixing and upgrading could happen.

P6-Loader made it easy

Written by Sue Hopkins

Client Overview

The client is a large Canadian producer, transporter and marketer of natural gas, oil and natural gas liquids. They use P6 for many project controls functions including their capital program. After years of working in a P6 database they wanted to move to a clean P6 environment.

Challenges

  • Their IT department needed assistance in Upgrading and Migrating Major Projects and Facility, Engineering and Construction databases to a new environment

  • Their Security Profiles, User and Global Data, some of which were corrupt needed to be cleaned up prior to move to new environments

  • Move large live projects with up to 100 baselines to the new environment in a short amount of time while users were not active

Results

  • Databases edited and cleaned up prior to migration. Including Security Profiles, User and Global Data, some of which were corrupt using P6-Loader tool

  • Archived old projects in place and moved over 400 projects and baselines to new environment with only one weekend of down time

  • Migrated data was validated and compared to previous database to ensure all data was moved accurately

  • Saved hundreds of hours of manual work