Emerald has been doing a lot of work lately in the Turnaround space helping large oil companies efficiently plan and execute their Turnaround projects. Increasing productivity and efficiency has always been important for oil producers, but now more than ever we are seeing a higher demand due to the current market conditions. This is when Emerald’s Primavera add-on tools come into play. Emerald’s tools become truly indispensable when time, cost savings and the optimization of work processes are high priorities.

The benefits of integrating Primavera P6’s database with Microsoft Excel have long been a secret weapon of many advanced Primavera users. By leveraging spreadsheet functionality to manipulate project and enterprise level P6 data and avoid time consuming manual data entry, users are able to drastically increase their productivity and leave envious colleagues in awe of their P6 wizardry.

The Primavera Software Development Kit (SDK) is a legacy technology feature that is included with Primavera P6. It was released with P6 r3.0 (at the time known as P3e). It implements an ODBC driver that enables a connection between the Primavera P6 data store and other software such as Excel or Access. However, as the underlying P6 technology has advanced significantly in recent years, many are finding the old SDK tricks falling short in today’s Primavera enterprise environments. Some serious technical drawbacks of the antiquated SDK have made it a non-option for many Primavera client companies.

This is a very common and puzzling question for someone who is installing P6 on a single workstation and is only going to have a single user – should I go with P6 Professional, also known as Primavera Project Portfolio Management (PPM), or P6 Enterprise, also known as Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM)?

One of our consultants who is currently loading large amounts of P6 data using Emerald’s P6 Loader came to me with a concern that there is sometimes a lag between loading information using our P6 Loader (via the API’s) and it appearing in P6, even if he repeatedly pressed the F5 (Refresh) key. The lag could be minutes or hours depending on the situation.

Working in the field is such an amazing and rewarding experience. I recently returned from a large turnaround project that was implemented by one of Emerald’s largest customers in Fort McMurray.

The proper management of resources on a turnaround project is vital to its success. Levelling functionality of Primavera P6 is heavily utilized by planners and schedulers to make sure the deadlines set by the turnaround (TA) management are met and resources are utilized in the optimum way.

A turnaround is a very large undertaking. The first and foremost priority must be safety. Always keeping that in mind, the team must address all aspects of the in scope (known work) as well as found work (which has the potential for a few surprises!). Scheduling of such an event is a must!