P6-Loader

We have all experienced at one point or another how tedious (and time consuming) setting or changing resource availability can be in the P6 resource dictionary. Particularly for an example like the one we will walk through where you are setting up or adjusting turnaround resources and the weekend rule happens to be ½ crews.

The P6-Loader can ease the pain of these types of tasks.

In P6, identifying each specific project using each of the Global Calendars in a concise, fast, easy to use manner is challenging. Some may think this is not necessary very often, but in my experience, it has been quite the opposite!

Is this functionality already handled in Primavera P6, Client or Web? A very good question - let’s have a look.

When you have a large number of users in your P6 database, it is surprising how quickly that database can get “clogged up” with a lot of unwanted data. This happens even when using Sandbox databases, restricting privileges and every other trick you have thought of; long time P6 users know what I am talking about.

On every Turnaround there are Pre-Turnaround activities that do not get done prior to the actual Turnaround and need to be moved into the Turnaround phase of the schedule.

The challenge is how to record actual hours earned in the PRE phase vs the TA phase, since a large number of these activities already have earned hours associated with them. Simply moving the activities would decrease the reporting of hours in PRE and create earned hours in TA for work that was actually done in PRE.

This can be done simply and quickly with P6-Loader.

UDFs - Making Sure They are Clean

When working with a client to setup cost controls in P6, we were working with budgets, estimates, work in progress, incurred to dates etc. These required a lot of User-Defined Fields in P6 to make sure we were able to cleanly track all the values we were pulling from the disparate systems from accounting to spreadsheets.

As a contractor, we were planning to track both the costs of the project delivery and the sale to the client. This way we could also report on profit margins and markup.

Project codes in the global dictionary are an important part of an organization's enterprise data in P6. Needless to say, keeping this dictionary (as well as other global data dictionaries) clean and well-organized is an essential task for the application administrator, as well as for other admin superusers. Incorrectly named project codes and project code values result in confusion and translates into unproductive time for the users, which ultimately results in losses for the company. 

The P6-Loader helps streamline and accelerate many processes, one of which is creating new P6 users.  The P6-Loader is a flexible and secure solution that allows users with the correct security access on their P6 profile to extract and upload nearly every data element in P6 data.  Let’s have a look at how easy it makes creating new P6 users.

Login to the P6-Loader with your credentials.

Selecting the proper software licensing model can be a rather cumbersome exercise. It requires IT administrator and project managers etc. to go through many different steps and ask questions such as:

• Should I use Named User license model?
• How many users will need access to the software?
• What if more people will join our team down the road?
• Can I decrease without penalties /cancellation fee number of licenses?
• What if a user needs access to the software temporarily and may not need it later? How can I handle the cost of such scenarios efficiently?
• How much paperwork will I need to fill in and how much time will it take to process an amendment request?
• What if person is on vacation? Can I reuse a license for another employee?
• How can I track who/when/how uses the system?
• As a contractor I want to track usage on a per project basis so I can invoice my clients respectively?

Many advanced Primavera P6 users have been manipulating XER’s for years – in fact there are tools out there specifically for manipulating XER’s. We have always recommended against manipulating XER’s and here is an example of why:

We are working with a client who is consolidating many separate P6 databases into a production database, turnaround database and an archive database. Along with the thousands of projects being exported from the old databases to the new ones, our client wants the baselines for projects exported, imported and reattached for a large number of the projects. If you have ever had to un-assign and restore baselines and then turn around and attach and reassign them for even a handful of projects, you know how tedious and time consuming it can be. First, the baseline has to be un-assigned, then restored to a project in the original database. Once the baseline has been imported into the new database, the baseline has to be converted back into a baseline and re-attached to the original project.

We often have clients ask us the most efficient way to change out resource assignments. This often happens when work that is expected to be assigned to one resource gets assigned to another.

For example – I want to change the resources in a particular plant from my own staff and assign it to a contractor. In this simple example, I have decided to give all the trade work in one plant to Jacobs instead of performing with my own labor force. I want to remap the resource assignments as follows:

When we added the financial period dictionary to the v4 P6-Loader, I thought it was a waste of time and no one would really use it. With P6 having a wizard already to create financial periods, I thought that was good enough. Well, I was wrong.

Recently, while converting a client from P6 r8.3 to r15.2, we had to move a number of baselines to the new database. We used our P6-Loader to unassign and detach the baselines from the current project and then created XER’s to move them to the new database.

To our surprise, when we imported the baselines as projects into the new 15.2 database, the WBS elements were all messed up. Instead of one project with many WBS elements, our project appeared as many different projects, one per WBS, all with the same Project ID. They also appeared outside the EPS structure and P6 wouldn’t let us move them into the correct EPS node. Every attempt gave us the error that “ is not a valid integer value”.

The Emerald team just completed a client migration to the Oracle Primavera SaaS Cloud. The client had over 1000 small (50-60 activities) projects in their on-premise Primavera P6 PPM v8.3.2. They needed to be able to share the projects for the next 2 years amongst a large collaborative program team with multiple contractors and engineering firms. This program is very high profile and reporting is paramount. 

Working with P6 resource assignments and resource dictionaries can be extremely time-consuming. The task becomes especially tedious when it comes to planning a turnaround project with multiple daily shifts and varying crew sizes on day and night shifts, or a capital project where you have rotating work shifts with crews overlapping on the back shift.