In the P6 toolbars choices, an Activity Critical Path toolbar is now available. Let’s have a quick look at the icons.

Do you have project critical path status information at your fingertips? Your project teams need current criticality information to make timely, informed project decisions. Delayed decisions or basing decisions on old information can be costly to your projects.

Using the new criticality report now available with P6-Reporter, the current criticality information will always be at your fingertips. Use the filters to choose the file and snapshot required. Keep in mind, the snapshot process can be carried out manually or be automated.

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 often, that’s not how the resource dictionary hierarchy is set up. How do we solve this problem? Well, an easy solution to the reporting requirement is using resource codes.

Can you readily monitor commodities on your P6 projects? For example, if your business is oil and gas, can you readily track the requirements of casing or the production levels of oil? For tracking your projects, consider self-serve dashboards for your portfolio of projects.

How are you reporting summary progress information on your project? For example, how are you tracking and reporting inspections? Does your team have access to Valve, Exchanger or Piping Summaries in their project reporting dashboards? Provide your team access to easy to digest status reports on progress specifics on your project that are updated using automated snap shots in EP-datawarehouse. The added information availability is not an extra task that your team needs to spend time on. Once the regular updates to your schedule are completed/reviewed/analyzed, a snap shot of the project is taken. The snapshot process can be automated or you can do it manually if you prefer. The snap shot provides the current information to P6-Reporter dashboard reports. The information the dashboard user views are the latest available from the snap shots. Having regular snapshots of your projects to feed dashboard reports which work to streamline the reporting process. This ensures all team members have access to the most current information with no printing and/or emailing of the reports required for distribution. Previous snapshots are available for easy access if required in P6-Reporter self-serve dashboards; just change the Report date in the drop down menu. Below are some examples of Summary reports displayed in Tableau. Similar reports can be displayed using ODV and Power BI as well.

The cancel function has been long available in TAPS Classic and has now been added to TAPS Mobile. Just how easy is this function to use? This easy:

Step 1 – Enter your credentials and Sign In.

Whether it is inspections, pressure safety valves, piping or other elements you are tracking in your P6 Schedule, you can use P6-Reporter Green Up reports which are easily created and maintained right from your P6 schedule. That is correct - no separate spreadsheets required!

TAPS is not just a tool to streamline P6 project file updates. Are you looking to monitor and report on earned value (EV) at the resource level? P6 out of the box (OOTB) calculates EV at the activity level. Using TAPS Classic or Mobile provides some additional background calculations which are available for monitoring and reporting from P6 itself or from P6-Reporter (if you are using that tool). Even when multiple resources are assigned to an activity, the EV calculated in P6 OOTB is at the activity level. With EV calculations at the resource level you can gain more insight into where you may need to step in because a subcontractor is struggling (for example). With any issues easily identified, the assistance required can be coordinated and implemented to help bring activity progress closer in line with the execution plan as well as document lessons learned to prevent repeat occurrences.

Access your self-serve Project Detail Dashboard for easy to digest project information (displayed below in Tableau). Just choose the project and snapshot you want to view using the filters at the top left corner of the dashboard. The project displayed in the dashboard below is a drilling project. This example is food for thought on reporting options available for your projects.

Your P6-QA metrics are now available in Power BI reports. You can also create custom reports via our P6-Reporter tool.

Are you processing updates to your schedule manually and think that is the best option? I recently assisted a team with a project where, in order to complete the project schedule updates in an acceptable timeframe, their company decided to hire additional people just for the updates. I understand the time constraint they were under, but for follow-up projects, there are more efficient, less costly options available that also keep your updates less prone to data entry errors. One example is TAPS Mobile. 

TAPS Mobile allows update processing from your mobile device. That may not sound like a high-impact item, but keep in mind, every time data has to be handled, it is a labor spend (time and dollars). There is also the introduction of another data touch point where a data entry error may occur. You can streamline the update process by submitting updates directly from a mobile device. Instead of filling out a report and then inputting those updates into the project manually, consider completing your status checks, inputting the information into your mobile device, and clicking save to send the update(s) directly to P6. This streamlined update process can provide additional time to analyze the schedule updates. Proper schedule analysis is an important step and can get severely crunched if the entry of schedule updates is not streamlined but instead a labor-intensive, time-consuming process.

Often we need to compare and analyze multiple scenarios for our projects. Using EP-datawarehouse, we can store a snapshot of each scenario. These snapshots can be compared directly using P6-Reporter. The user can compare assignments as well as costs. Let’s have a look at an example of rig assignment scenario comparisons. Utilizing P6 scheduling functionality, build the scenarios in P6. Once the scenarios are created, create snap shots of the scenarios in EP-datawarehouse.

Taking snapshots can be an automated process, but you can create them manually as well. Creating a snapshot manually is easy to accomplish.



Complete the required updates in your P6 schedule and then create a snapshot.

To create the snapshot, go to the projects tab in P6 and set the ‘EP-dw – Snapshot – Period’ and the ‘EP-dw – Snapshot – Run’ fields.

Easy access to up-to-date, easy-to-digest reporting is available by including Power BI reports on your projects. Keep the process convenient and streamlined to allow your team to focus their efforts on the project while simply digesting the dashboard reports. P6-Reporter brings with it EP-datawarehouse and a set of standard reports. That does not mean the users are confined to that specific set of reports. As additional reports are added to P6-Reporter, you will have access to all the new reports as well. You and your team can also add to the P6-Reporter report collection by creating additional reports yourselves. These options put you and your team in a position to not only fill all reporting requirements on your project but to streamline your reporting and improve project communication.

In this blog, we will look at couple of examples in Tableau and Power BI. These dashboards are not an all-inclusive list but meant as food for thought.   

This blog is a deep dive into what can be accomplished with codes using P6-Scrubber prior to importing an XER/XML file. Frequently, when importing a schedule from an outside source into our existing database, there are codes we want to either delete, rename or, in the case of activity codes, rolldown to the project level. P6-Scrubber is able to handle all of these cases.