Automate Document Loading Into Primavera Contract Management
Materials Delivery Documents Added to Emerald's PCM Loader
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.
The way that Contract Management is used from company to company can vary quite a bit so it’s not unusual for a new customer to see a need for automated document loading that we haven’t thought of yet. When we’re approached about adding support for a new document type for the PCM Loader, we usually consider a few basic questions before taking on the project.
The first question we ask is: does the PCM API support the document type? This is an important question because our PCM Loader has been built to use the PCM API which allows us to use the security and validation that’s already built into the API. If the API does not support a specific document type, then we know it will be a more difficult project because we will have to write custom code to get the data into the database. In this case, we confirmed that the Materials Delivery document type is supported by the API.
The next question we usually consider is what type of line items does the document type have? Some documents have more than one type of line items and sometimes line items might link to other types of documents. Also, some documents have costs and cost distributions which requires some additional effort to write the code to support this. In this case, after reviewing the Materials Delivery, we were able to confirm that the line items are fairly simple with no cost distributions.
For the Materials Delivery loader, we could see other customers wanting to use this feature and we knew we could build it so we went ahead and added it to the PCM Loader. Because we have already developed an extensive code library to support the PCM Loader, adding support for the Materials Delivery only took a few days and we were able to release a new version of the PCM Loader with Material Delivery support added.