A solution for common cases of accidental data deletion in Primavera P6
Accidental deletion of important data is something that happens. Everyone has done it at some point.
In Primavera P6 EPPM, some of the most common cases of accidental data deletion are:
- Deletion of the wrong resource
- Deletion of the wrong project
- Deletion of the wrong WBS node or nodes
Written by Ravi Wallau - Integration Specialist, Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Tuesday, 16 May 2023.
Posted in P6-Auditor, P6-Loader, Primavera P6
In this article I will visit some of the data a user may be utilizing in Primavera P6 and how it is handled or not handled in Oracle Primavera Cloud (OPC). These are some of the differences found that may be of interest to current Primavera P6 users.
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Sunday, 23 April 2023.
Posted in Primavera Cloud, Primavera P6
Your project schedule has been created with no resource curves incorporated. (Resource curves are not always required.) Suddenly, during project execution and reporting, the project is displaying issues. Budget labor, actual labor units and at completion labor units are out of sync. In checking your schedule, it is one section of the schedule which looks to be displaying the issue. You find one of the schedulers has added resource curves to activity resources. At the time of the change, a number of the activities already had progress posted to them. What can happen when resource curves are added or changed after progress has been posted to activities? (Please note this is an example of what can happen given the settings and information scenario that was present at the time. My intent is purely to share what can happen.)
Written by Mary Lynn Backstrom, PMP, PMI-SP, PMI-BA – Implementation Specialist
on Thursday, 09 March 2023.
Posted in Primavera P6
In the P6 toolbars choices, an Activity Critical Path toolbar is now available. Let’s have a quick look at the icons.

Written by Mary Lynn Backstrom, PMP, PMI-SP, PMI-BA – Implementation Specialist
on Friday, 03 February 2023.
Posted in Primavera P6
We have been using P6 v18.x with several clients and have seen some differing behavior related to caching. It appears the problem may have started as early as P6 v16.x. These clients are in varying environments; P6 Oracle SaaS, EAI Hosted, and on-premise - In short, anywhere where Oracle Cloud Connect is utilized.
We were excited to see the new form of caching that appeared in v17.x. We have clients with poor internet access and P6Web is not adequate for their needs - they need P6 Client. Everyone knows that P6 Client is very chatty and needs good bandwidth to work properly, so the idea that we can cache data and do heavy lifting on our desktop rather than on the server far away was great.
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Monday, 15 July 2019.
Posted in Primavera P6
Remember our good old friend the POBS Table? Well, we have a new friend in town that is introducing itself to our database in the form of the RISKTYPE table. We have discovered numerous clients are importing XER files to their database that include a large number of Risk Categories, sometimes tens of thousands of them. No one knows where they originated, but they are multiplying and wreaking havoc.
The problem comes when an export file is created with unwanted Risk Types and imported into another database, creating more values in the destination database. The destination database then could share their large number of Risk Types to another database. Each time, the RISKTYPE table is passed along, it grows, spreading and infecting more and more databases.
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Wednesday, 19 June 2019.
Posted in Primavera P6
Introducing our Latest Primavera P6 Add-on
Are you importing schedules into scrubbing databases, taking out all the unwanted data you don't want to pollute your production database, re-exporting the schedule and then importing it into the database where it should have gone in the first place?
Do you have required specifications your contractors need to follow for their schedules, but have a hard time knowing whether those details are missing or incorrect until you've already imported them?
Do you want to ensure you are not importing POBS tables and corrupted RISKTYPE tables?
That's a lot of quality assurance to do! Maintaining your corporate data standards for dashboarding and reporting can be a full time job, especially when project teams have their own coding structures and requirements for their P6 Environment.
Don't worry; there's relief. Emerald has developed a new tool that will do all that work for you! We are now introducing P6-Scrubber.
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Wednesday, 19 June 2019.
Posted in P6-Scrubber, Primavera P6
Written by Nicole Jardin, P.Eng. - CEO
on Wednesday, 19 June 2019.
Posted in Primavera P6
Are you finding when you are importing or exporting a large number of projects that not all the projects are coming across when they are imported?
While converting a client from P6 V8.3 to V15.2, we found the data was not always transferred completely when we migrated large numbers of projects. Instead, with XER file sizes larger than 100,000 KB not all projects were exported and/or imported. We confirmed this recently on a subsequent project with a different client where we were migrating projects from P6 V7.3 to V17.12 and encountered the same issue.
In the first case, we exported the projects using an XER. Our file was over 300,000 KB. We found 4-5 projects were not exported. When we imported the same file, there were 2-3 additional projects that were not imported to the new database.

We looked at additional files for the same client and found that in XER files with a size larger than approximately 100,000 KB there were several projects in each XER missing when the file was imported.
Once we reduced the number of projects in the exported XER files to keep the file size under 100,000 KB, we found no projects were lost and our data was accurate.

Keep an eye on XER files larger than 100,000 KB when importing and exporting, they may not have complete data in them once they are imported.
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Thursday, 06 December 2018.
Posted in Primavera P6
Using Resource Codes has been very helpful on many Turnarounds. Often on a Turnaround (or any large project) you need to report resource availability and requirements in your schedule by Craft (trade) and Company.
But that is often not the way the resource dictionary hierarchy is set up? And you likely are not able to do anything about that since the Administrator probably controls that.
Written by Mary Lynn Backstrom, PMP, PMI-SP, PMI-BA – Implementation Specialist
on Monday, 14 January 2019.
Posted in Primavera P6, Turnarounds
In P6, identifying which projects are using each Activity Code in a quick, consolidated, easy to use manner is challenging. Especially when you consider some clients have a LOT of baselines.
But is this is r-e-a-l-l-y information we need to be able to capture? In my experience, there are a number of scenarios where that answer is a resounding “Yes”! One common example – the Activity Codes Dictionary needs to be cleaned up.
Written by Mary Lynn Backstrom, PMP, PMI-SP, PMI-BA – Implementation Specialist
on Thursday, 29 November 2018.
Posted in P6-Loader, Primavera P6
When you are working on a project and you move from Project into Support, sometimes it is hard to decide the exact cutoff point for the project team to start
charging to the new support project. I had a problem the other day where I needed to decide the end date and cut over. The client selected a date a few weeks
before we had thought we were going to cut it off after she checked her budgets and we realized we were going to go over.
So I had to go back to
look through the timesheets we had submitted in Team Member to get the time reallocated before sending it into our QuickBooks where we invoice from.
on Tuesday, 27 November 2018.
Posted in Primavera P6
Ideas in Oracle Prime:
Use Oracle Prime to create ideas: capture, evaluate, and process the ideas for new initiatives and business endeavors.
Ideas are processed using a submission and approval workflow. Prime Projects provides a default workflow for processing ideas, or you can create a customized workflow. First the idea creator creates an idea and specifies the idea's business case. When an idea contains sufficient information, the creator can submit the idea for further processing by routers and owners.
Written by Mary Lynn Backstrom, PMP, PMI-SP, PMI-BA – Implementation Specialist
on Tuesday, 14 August 2018.
Posted in Other, Primavera P6
on Tuesday, 31 July 2018.
Posted in Primavera P6
Manually wading through a schedule and looking for errors is time consuming and prone to human error. Not only that, it's boring. No one wants to do it, but you need to check your schedule for errors!
Even worse then working through your own schedule for errors, is slogging through a contractor's. When you don't know how they have built the schedule, it can take days to make sure things hold together. Some of our clients have several layouts, reports and even special access databases and outside tools to do this which is very time consuming, error prone and boring.
Written by Sue Fermelia - Implementation Specialist
on Wednesday, 09 May 2018.
Posted in P6-QA, Primavera P6