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.

If you are a Java programmer, or if your organization has a Java programmer who is eager to learn about the Primavera API, there is a world of possibilities about what you can do with your P6 database. The P6 API is a powerful solution that lets you interact with the P6 database from a Java application.

When I added my first baseline in 15.2, I uttered a few choice words because they were not working!

I could not see my baseline, it was not doing anything and I was getting a bit annoyed to say the least. I could not understand what was going on, I mean baselining is not a new thing in P6. So before you panic and get worked up like I did, you need to know that Primavera has made a technology change here.

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.

When trying to work through a large schedule and trying to understand the sequence of work, what tools can help make sense of multiple paths?

This is a question I have addressed numerous times in P6 training classes and at client sites when building huge turnaround schedules with the planning team. In days gone by (P3 days), we used to print trailer walls full of these logic diagrams. I am talking about 30 feet long by 10 feet high easily.

But with trace logic, we can do a lot of troubleshooting without killing so many trees.

We recently turned our clocks forward an hour for the daylight savings adjustment. Today our users could not log into Team Member - they got an error indicating that the “Current Timesheet Period Does Not Exist”. What gives?

In early 2017, Oracle CEGBU (Primavera) released P6-EPPM in their SaaS Cloud. This is part of their new release strategy for their SaaS Cloud of monthly releases while on-premise releases will be switched to yearly only.

In reading a P6 setup recommendation document for one of our IT program clients I almost fell off of my chair when I saw the recommendation for resource leveling. It said not to use resource leveling as it introduces too many variables into the scheduling process. For an IT group not to be using resource leveling in a program is crazy!

Believe it or not, we see this advice suggested a LOT.

We are working with a client who have been on the Primavera SaaS cloud for awhile and are now getting serious about migrating their dispersed team to the Oracle Primavera SaaS cloud for their P6 users. We are helping them with this process using our P6-Loader for P6 v16.2 in the cloud. We wanted to go with P6-EPPM version 16.2.3, since it has some crucial patches applied to it in the last 3 months and seems to be stable.

Then we get the news we were dreading, no you can't get that version you must upgrade to version P6 17.1? So we went to Oracle e-delivery to download P6 17.1 and guess what? It is not even released for on-premise use. So what is going on?

We had heard rumors that the upgrade model in the Primavera SaaS Cloud was going to change, but did not want to believe them. Now we cannot ignore them anymore.

When planning a turnaround project you want to make sure you include all the tasks that will happen and even those that might happen. This is a great strategy in the planning phase because during the actual turnaround, you don't have time to add all of the “potential” activities that become necessary.

Now the dilemma becomes, how to cancel the tasks that your team doesn't need after all.

You could process the updates for cancelled activities using manual data entry, dealing with logic, manhours, and baselines, but if you handle a lot of these it becomes time consuming, tedious and frustrating. Lets face it, during a Turnaround that is just not a good idea. You might think that dissolving is good enough, but is it?

We have been working with a client using Primavera P6 for a large multi-year, multi-sprint IT project to revamp their customer loyalty program and overall customer experience. The team has been using P6-EPPM and have been aggressively putting together schedules for each key component of the program from infrastructure, to ERP, to integration testing and deployment.

This team is in large part new to P6, and they have been fighting to produce an overall program plan that has a continuous critical path so they can answer the usual question “when are we going to be done?”.

Oracle Primavera Analytics requires one of the following three Oracle Business Intelligence products, which must be licensed separately:

• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Foundation Edition
• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Extended Edition
• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Foundation Edition for Oracle Applications

Only versions 11.1.1.9.160719 and 12.2.1.1.0 of these products are supported with Primavera Analytics 16.2.

I’m using acronyms liberally in this entry for your and my benefit … these names are a mouthful!

• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Foundation Edition (OBISFE)
• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Extended Edition (OBISEE)

Of these three choices, two options do not impose supplemental restrictions on how you can use Oracle Business Intelligence with Primavera Analytics within your organization.

When you are building up your schedule it is easy to miss assigning roles to resources, especially if you did not use roles at first and are introducing them after the fact. Another common scenario is when you are importing contractors' P6 schedules and are merging them into your turnaround plan or a large capital program where you are reporting both on resources as well as roles for trades and discipline rollups.

A very common pain point when trying to align project schedules to company or project SOPs (standard operating procedures) is ensuring activity id breakdowns are consistent (as outlined in your company schedule business processes). This can be a real nightmare especially if you are working with multiple contractors and engineering firms all with different structures and standards.

Let’s help our new schedulers get up and running faster then ever before.

I love training up new schedulers. I've been a scheduling lead for years and always get a kick out of teaching new users best practices that I have learned the hard way.