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Emerald Blog

Stories, Tips And Tricks From Our Team’s Experiences With Primavera Since 1995

Are You Tracking Ideas? Are Approved Ideas Easily Translated into Project Proposals?

Ideas in Oracle Prime:

Use Oracle Prime to create ideas: capture, evaluate, and process the ideas for new initiatives and business endeavors.

Ideas are processed using a submission and approval workflow. Prime Projects provides a default workflow for processing ideas, or you can create a customized workflow. First the idea creator creates an idea and specifies the idea's business case. When an idea contains sufficient information, the creator can submit the idea for further processing by routers and owners.

DOTs and Emerald Associates - We Can Make Your Job Easier

Emerald Associates is well known in the US and Canada for our homegrown add-on tools for Primavera P6. We have assisted numerous companies in many diverse areas to get the most out of their P6 software. You may wonder how our tools can assist in the Department of Transportation (DOT) field to get more done in P6 with less time while still providing useful data to your stakeholders and remaining good stewards of the public's funds. Our tools will help you do more work in less time, so that your project management group has more time to analyze and perfect their schedules.

P6-QA and the Project Scheduler

Manually wading through a schedule and looking for errors is time consuming and prone to human error. Not only that, it's boring. No one wants to do it, but you need to check your schedule for errors!

Even worse then working through your own schedule for errors, is slogging through a contractor's. When you don't know how they have built the schedule, it can take days to make sure things hold together. Some of our clients have several layouts, reports and even special access databases and outside tools to do this which is very time consuming, error prone and boring.

Finding Setting Up or Changing Resource Availability in P6 a Struggle?

We have all experienced at one point or another how tedious (and time consuming) setting or changing resource availability can be in the P6 resource dictionary. Particularly for an example like the one we will walk through where you are setting up or adjusting turnaround resources and the weekend rule happens to be ½ crews.

P6-Loader can ease the pain of these types of tasks.

Global Calendars – Exactly Which Projects Are Using Each Calendar?

In P6, identifying each specific project using each of the Global Calendars in a concise, fast, easy to use manner is challenging. Some may think this is not necessary very often, but in my experience, it has been quite the opposite!

Is this functionality already handled in Primavera P6, Client or Web? A very good question - let’s have a look.

Do You Need EV Calculated at the Resource Level?

You are correct; out-of-the-box P6 does not calculate Earned Value (EV) at the resource assignment level. It only runs EV at the activity level which is fine for a start, but what to do when you need to 'dig deeper' and analyze crew performance? You can't use Global Change to calculate the resource assignment EV because the activity percent complete isn't available in the Global Change list of fields.

A very simple option is to use TAPS to input your schedule updates. TAPS is P6 updating using barcodes (plus additional functionality). By using TAPS, updates are faster and more accurate giving you (and your team) more time for schedule analysis. Yes, TAPS runs EV calculations at the resource level.

P6-Loader Usage Sheets Revolutionize P6 Database Maintenance

When you have a large number of users in your P6 database, it is surprising how quickly that database can get “clogged up” with a lot of unwanted data. This happens even when using Sandbox databases, restricting privileges and every other trick you have thought of; long time P6 users know what I am talking about.

P6-Loader - Easy Moving of Pre-Turnaround Work to the Turnaround Window

On every Turnaround there are Pre-Turnaround activities that do not get done prior to the actual Turnaround and need to be moved into the Turnaround phase of the schedule.

The challenge is how to record actual hours earned in the PRE phase vs the TA phase, since a large number of these activities already have earned hours associated with them. Simply moving the activities would decrease the reporting of hours in PRE and create earned hours in TA for work that was actually done in PRE.

This can be done simply and quickly with P6-Loader.

My PCM Forms/Reports are not Updating, What is Going on with BI Publisher?

In deploying our Emerald Primavera Contract Management (PCM) Productivity Cloud, we got the vanilla PCM installed and added our PCM add-on utilities for line numbering controls. Then we added some of our P6 and PCM automations to move change documents between the two systems.

To be on the safe side, we took backups and renamed databases, but we couldn't have predicted what would happen next...

A Guide to P6 Archiving - Part 1

Archiving P6 Project Data and the Question of Time

We get asked on a regular basis what the best way to archive P6 data is.

  1. How long should a project file be kept?
  2. What should be done with the project files when that time period has expired?
  3. Where should they be kept?
  4. How can we retrieve if we need them, especially with upgrades?

In this blog series, we’ll look at some of the options available to a P6 user and discuss the question of time.

Archiving P6 Project Data and the Question of Time

What Is Happening With My Magic Quadrant Investor Map?

A Look Inside Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management Graphical Analysis

Last week I logged in to my Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management environment and found that my items were in the wrong quadrants. Rather than having current tasks in my upper quadrants and future tasks in my lower ones, all my tasks were being broadcast as low priority and ending up at the bottom of the quadrant.

OPPM Magic Quadrant1

How to Publish P6 Project Data - Now That You Have To

In Primavera P6 16.x and Beyond You Need to Publish Your Project Data for Resource Analysis and a Whole Lot More

When working with resources in Primavera P6 Web version 16.x on, there is a new twist: the need to publish data. If you are trying to analyze resources and the following message displays, it's time to publish.

P6 Warning - Resources Don't Have Published Data