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.

The Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is a powerful and affordable solution for any company that is interested in taking advantage of an engineered system, aimed at providing the best performance for an Oracle database. The Oracle database can run in a “bare metal” configuration, or it can run in a virtualized mode.

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.

I woke up with little stress or angst the other day despite the fact that I knew we were replacing a memory module on Emerald’s Primavera-in-a-Box solution that was running production workloads for a client in the energy industry.

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.

The Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is part of Oracle’s flagship Engineered Systems that are designed to optimize the entire hardware and software technology stack to deliver extreme performance, reliability and high availability. Now while there are many advantages, we want to highlight how much this system reduces deployment and database provisioning time down to a few hours compared to the multiple weeks it would take using traditional legacy systems.

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.

Recently, we were asked by a potential customer about adding support for Materials Delivery documents to the PCM Loader. Because the development of the PCM Loader has been customer driven, we always welcome the opportunity to consider adding support for new document types.

We had the opportunity to install and evaluate the latest version of Instantis EnterpriseTrack Version 9 in our demo environment. Instantis EnterpriseTrack is a cloud based project portfolio management solution provided by Oracle Primavera with the key feature of quick and easy deployment.