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Emerald Blog

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

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Addressing Primavera System and Connectivity Issues

Over the last few years I have worked with many clients on turnaround projects in remote trailers on job sites that didn't have great connectivity. Now I am no techie, so I cannot pinpoint what causes the problem, but I know there is a problem when the coffee maker is the busiest place in the trailer. Now I am talking trailer coffee here folks, that stuff is gut rot at the best of times. If the planning team is hanging around, it is because they have been kicked out of Primavera P6 again!

Primavera P6 Connectivity

In the current economy the mere suggestion of financial spends to address system issues are something that will elicit gasps, face palms and shocked facial expressions, let alone a few choice words. But during one of these “extended coffee breaks” I did some number crunching out of curiosity on what the downtime costs really were.

Team Member - P6 Version 16.2

There Are Some Great Improvements To Talk About

As longtime users of Primavera P6 and Timesheets, we were pleasantly surprised to see some great improvements in the timesheets part of P6 v 16.2. The approval portal, which used to be very hard (I would even say impossible) to work with, is now much easier. Oracle has particularly improved the ability to find what timesheets need approval, and there is better adherence to layered approvals by the resource and project managers. Both of these tasks used to be ordeals in the previous versions.

Primavera P6 UDFs are a Breeze with the P6-Loader

UDFs - Making Sure They are Clean

When working with a client to setup cost controls in P6, we were working with budgets, estimates, work in progress, incurred to dates etc. These required a lot of User-Defined Fields in P6 to make sure we were able to cleanly track all the values we were pulling from the disparate systems from accounting to spreadsheets.

As a contractor, we were planning to track both the costs of the project delivery and the sale to the client. This way we could also report on profit margins and markup.

A Simple How To Guide on Scripting with the P6 API

A Technical Example Demonstrating What you can do With the P6 API

If you are a Java programmer, or if your organization has a Java programmer who is eager to learn about the Primavera API, there is a world of possibilities about what you can do with your P6 database. The P6 API is a powerful solution that lets you interact with the P6 database from a Java application.

P6 Baseline Changes in Version 15.2 and Above

Baseline Moved to Job Services

When I added my first baseline in 15.2, I uttered a few choice words because they were not working!

I could not see my baseline, it was not doing anything and I was getting a bit annoyed to say the least. I could not understand what was going on, I mean baselining is not a new thing in P6. So before you panic and get worked up like I did, you need to know that Primavera has made a technology change here.

Poorly Named Data Elements in Your P6 Global Dictionary Causing Confusion?

A Project Code Called EPS!

Project codes in the global dictionary are an important part of an organization's enterprise data in P6. Needless to say, keeping this dictionary (as well as other global data dictionaries) clean and well-organized is an essential task for the application administrator, as well as for other admin superusers. Incorrectly named project codes and project code values result in confusion and translates into unproductive time for the users, which ultimately results in losses for the company.

Chasing Down Logic in P6? Trace Logic to the Rescue

When trying to work through a large schedule and trying to understand the sequence of work, what tools can help make sense of multiple paths?

This is a question I have addressed numerous times in P6 training classes and at client sites when building huge turnaround schedules with the planning team. In days gone by (P3 days), we used to print trailer walls full of these logic diagrams. I am talking about 30 feet long by 10 feet high easily.

But with trace logic, we can do a lot of troubleshooting without killing so many trees.

Saying Goodbye to Expedition 8.5 and Hello to Unifier - Part 2

A Case Study From A Technical Perspective

Alberta’s Capital Health was a big user of Expedition from the 1990s through to 2010. They had hundreds of projects that were sitting on a Sybase SQL-Anywhere server that needed to be retired, but they needed to have easy access to the documents related to these health care projects.

Emerald solved their problem using the PCM-Archiver. This PCM add-on tool automates the extraction process of all projects and documents, and in this case, ultimately saved the client approximately 140 hours of computing work. For a more in-depth understanding of this project and its results, please refer to Part 1 of Saying Goodbye to Expedition 8.5 and Hello to Unifier. In Part 2, we are going to explore a more technical perspective including some of the bumps we experienced along the way of extracting 1,213,318 documents, generating 1,123,318 Excel files, generating links for 39,384 attachments, and generating 91,236 PDF files!

Saying Goodbye to Expedition 8.5 and Hello to Unifier - Part 1

A Case Study From A Functional Perspective

Primavera Expedition, now known as Primavera Contract Management (PCM), was a great tool in its day and still is as PCM. We had a number of clients who ran their entire capital program on the tool with hundreds of large and small projects.

Now that PCM is moving into the extended support phase, how do you get years of data out of the system and preserve it for future reference?

Primavera P6 Resource Leveling - Too Complicated? No Way!

In reading a P6 setup recommendation document for one of our IT program clients I almost fell off of my chair when I saw the recommendation for resource leveling. It said not to use resource leveling as it introduces too many variables into the scheduling process. For an IT group not to be using resource leveling in a program is crazy!

Believe it or not, we see this advice suggested a LOT.

Save 5 Minutes Every Time You Cancel an Activity in Primavera P6

Whenever we have a client that is interested in TAPS, we always get the question about how an activity is updated to reflect that it has been cancelled. So, how does TAPS cancel activities?

Cancelled work is work that you have decided not to perform. Typically the turnaround (TA) team doesn’t want to delete the activity because that would change the baseline hours. On the other hand, they also don’t want to progress the activity which would earn hours.