We have had a number of complaints recently about the POBS imports really slowing down XER import performance and also complaints that the XER files coming out of Primavera P6 are huge.

Very few people realize that there are substring commands available in the P6 Global Change function (available in the P6 Client only).

Recently in a LinkedIn P6 group, a member was asking for help in renaming an activity UDF assignment. He had a large number of activities that he needed to change the UDF prefix on because of a plant renumbering. He had an existing UDF called Equip_ID and he needed to remove whatever the first character is and replace it with a ‘2’.

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.

We have been using v15.2 of P6, both EPPM and PPM, for 2 weeks now. I personally use the client or PPM the most. This version has been upgraded to 64 bit, and I can really see the difference in speed.

We recently had a support call from a client that started having performance issues with their P6 database during the pre-work phase of their turnaround. We looked at the Oracle 11.2.0.4 enterprise database and found a massive amount of archive logs being chewed up. In fact, it was on a scale of 1-2 GB of logs within 2-5 minutes on average. With that kind of volume it would not take long for a server to receive the dreaded Oracle error message ORA-00257: archiver error. When this happens the database usually needs more space on the device where the archive log files are stored, which results in the database not allowing any more transactions until the issue is corrected.

The P6-Loader is a unique Primavera enhancement tool developed by Emerald for the secure movement of data between Primavera P6 and Microsoft Excel. Many users are aware that P6 already has some built-in functionality, which is why I often hear this question from my students, as well as from my clients: How is the P6-Loader different from the built-in import and export functionality in P6 Client?

There are numerous differences between the two when it comes to choosing the right tool for importing/exporting your P6 data. Here are some of the main points to consider:

There has been a lot of excitement around the Emerald office with the release of Primavera P6 15.2. Emerald has been a Primavera partner for over two decades now and have come to learn that with each release there are some good surprises. Thanks goes out to Karen Pilla and the Oracle team for driving the next phase of developments on a mature product that helps project managers run some of the largest and smallest projects around the globe.

There are some issues that we observed when upgrading from the 15.1 release of Primavera P6 to version 15.1.6. When we ran the setup.exe file for P6 15.1.6 it did not change the build number after we logged into P6 client.

When registering for Emerald’s Primavera training courses, people often ask these kinds of questions:

• What version of P6 is this training based on?
• If I am using version 7 (8.1, 8.2, etc.) at work, will it be OK for me to take the training course on the latest version?

The truth is the version does not really matter. Indeed, with each new release, Oracle is making enhancements and adding functionality to the tool, making it even more attractive for the end users in different industries. At the same time, the core functionality of the tool remains the same.

As we get ready to launch our P6-QA tool we were doing our final QA of field names, usability etc. and I was just not loving Ravi’s Portuguese or programmer naming convention, (Sorry Ravi). But before I went crazy and just started to change the names and break everything, I used our P6-Loader to extract all the Primavera P6 UDFs (User Defined Fields) from our demo environment.

While working with a client the other day I was asked “when should we look at integration versus using a loader?”

I am not sure I answered the question particularly thoroughly in the moment, but thought it would be good to share some of Emerald’s surprising experiences related to both in our blog.

When creating reports using the current layout for the activity table in Primavera P6, we know that layouts can be customized depending on the information we want to display. These types of reports can be modified as they are built; they can be grouped, filtered, sorted and summarized for reporting purposes. You can also view summary information for the displayed columns per your criteria or your specific job requirements. But what happens if we want to merge different information into a single column? Or when we need information in the detail window that is not available as an option to be displayed as a column in our layouts?

Through the learning process there are always requirements that are not as obvious or easily implemented as we may think. For instance, neither relationship type nor lags are available as columns for our layouts. How can we make this process happen and do it in the most efficient way possible?

In chatting with a colleague, they expressed some of the difficulties they were experiencing in properly scheduling fleet maintenance shop work using their fleet management software. Our discussion centered around their maintenance process and the information they needed to track in order to streamline servicing/maintenance on the units in their fleet.

There were many difficulties being experienced with pain points such as (but not limited to) misplaced vehicle. For example, a vehicle was brought in for service, but did not arrive when it was scheduled to be in the shop (sometimes arriving early, sometimes late), or once in the shop, part requirements were discovered which necessitated the vehicle having to wait (the bay was needed for other servicing activity). In moving the vehicle out and back into the service bay, the actual tracking and confirmation of status was getting lost.

Maintaining the same Security Profiles across multiple databases (or Primavera P6 instances) within your organization can be a huge pain if you want to keep everything in sync. You need to define your OBS structure, global and project profiles, and the association of users to global profiles and OBS nodes, and replicate that manually across your organization.

Creating matching security profiles is particularly tedious because the information is presented in P6 in checkbox lists which are hard to follow and very difficult to compare from one P6 instance to another. Version 8 is even more convoluted than Version 7, since the checkboxes are now tabbed.