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Articles tagged with: CAPPS

CAPPS - v12 Release

Introducing CAPPS Version 12.0

Version 12 of CAPPS comes with a variety of new features and improvements, including greater grid functionality and adaptability, better clarity, and the addition of a baseline development tab.

January 31, 2025

Introducing CAPPS Version 12.0

Version 12 of CAPPS comes with a variety of new features and improvements, including greater grid functionality and adaptability, better clarity, and the addition of a baseline development tab.

New Features

  • Baseline Tab - Lets you get the extended team involved in planning the project tasks. In this first release of this feature, the PMs or leads can edit the task name, planned duration, and planned labor units. The baseline development changes can be reviewed and approved in CAPPS or within P6. This tab is only visible for users that have been tagged as CAPPS - Baseliners in an easy to manage hierarchical activity code.

  • Manual Entry into Date Fields - You are now able to manually type and fill down into the Start and Finish date fields instead of using the calendar and time pickers.

  • Groups for Approver and Submitter - The approver and submitter code can now be organized into a hierarchy. This allows approvers and submitters to work with the tasks they are assigned to as well as those in the group to ensure that tasks are not missed when a team member is away.

Enhancements

  • Activity Limit - The activity limit is always displayed on screen when the number of activities retrieved is above the limit. The default activity limit is set to 500 activities.

  • Grid Improvements - The identifying columns have been frozen in all of the grids so that they won’t scroll offscreen if the grid is scrolled horizontally. Additionally, the grid adapts to the page size and only the scrollbar of the grid is shown. This fixes the problem with scrollbars not being visible and the header columns being scrolled out of view.

  • Improved Fill-Down for Editable Fields Including Date Columns - Fill-down on the grid has been added to CAPPS. This works on editable fields including date columns saving a lot of data entry time. Copying and pasting has also been added to CAPPS for easier updating.

  • Better Clarity and Visibility - Short note and long note captions in the edit note grid have been renamed to be more clear, and approver notes are now visible in the task grid as our last submitter and approver fields.

  • Performance Improvements - In many cases, the time required to load the activities is now just a few seconds.

Course Good for All Project Roles

Really good course that was well presented and allowed project execution people from all roles to follow along.

Kelly Sehn, Primavera Basic Online Training Attendee, June 2022

CAPPS Webinar Highlight - Clip 1

The Capital Project Progressing System (CAPPS) is a custom Primavera P6 add-on tool that was developed by the team here at Emerald Associates to allow for your project engineering team to update their Oracle Primavera P6 schedules with ease. You can get timely feedback on drawings and quality steps, as well as hours worked, right from your engineering leads and specialty vendors. In addition, you can update from wherever you are using a computer, tablet, or phone. No previous knowledge of Primavera P6 is required. With improved forecast accuracy, increased task responsibility, and better collaboration, CAPPS is a must-have for the project team.

Take a look at the highlighted clip above from our CAPPS webinar for a quick, guided look at the layout and some of the different options available in CAPPS, along with an explanation of some of the features you may be using.

Interested in finding out more about how CAPPS can help you and your team to save time, money, and lots of frustration? Feel free to check out the links below!

CAPPS Webinar Highlight - Clip 2

The Capital Project Progressing System (CAPPS) is a custom Primavera P6 add-on tool that was developed by the team here at Emerald Associates to allow you and your team to update your Oracle Primavera P6 schedules with ease. You can get timely feedback on drawings and quality steps, as well as hours worked, right from your engineering leads and specialty vendors. Additionally, you can update from wherever you are using a computer, tablet, or phone. No prior knowledge of Primavera P6 is required. Drastically cut down on time with 75% faster status updates, while improving forecast accuracy, increasing task responsibility, and enhancing collaboration. With all these improvements and more, CAPPS is a must-have for the project team.

Take a look at the above highlight video from our CAPPS webinar for some examples showing how to do quick and easy updates with CAPPS.

Interested in finding out more about how CAPPS can help you and your team to save time, money, and lots of frustration? Feel free to take a look at the links below.

Large Engineering Firm Moves to EAI Hosting

Learn how a large engineering firm moved to the Emerald Cloud.

Emerald Cloud, Tools and Services - A Winning Combo

Written by Sue Hopkins

Client Overview

Client is an employee-owned multi-disciplined engineering, planning, architectural, and environmental services firm in the United States. With nearly 700 employees spread between more than 30 offices in 12 states, they offer a wide range of services with a focus on aviation, construction, facilities design, federal, power, transportation, survey, and water. They sit in the top 150 of the Engineering News-Record's prestigious Top 500 Design Firms list, while Zweig Group has recognized client as a best firm to work for in the multi-discipline category for six consecutive years.

Challenges

  • Client was looking for an alternative to the Oracle Cloud for them and the Department of Transportation (DOT) they were working with.

  • The Program Controls manager wanted faster response time on support tickets for four databases.

  • Needed a reliable environment for 80+ DOT users to fulfill their contract commitments.

Results

  • Moved hosting of four databases to the Emerald Cloud.

  • Decreased supported response time from days to hours

  • Able to bring their DOT client online with their environment in less than two months, including upgrade of P6 and rollout of new business processes.

  • Added a second DOT client to Emerald's hosting environment two years later.

CAPPS - Struggling Interproject Dependencies

Project Managers do some of the heavy-lifting to lighten the project controls team workload.

Weekly updating of OPEX and CAPEX projects in an Operational Plant

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

When you are working in an operational plant with daily maintenance, small upgrade projects and major expansion capital projects all going on at once, it is critical to manage schedule inter-dependencies and potential impacts so that nothing goes off the rails.

Challenges

  • Reporting weekly progress and monthly costs to date on over 50-100 projects

  • Reviewing inter-dependencies, schedule impacts, and coordinating crews with area holds

  • Balancing the project controls teams' overtime each week and at the end of the month

  • Ensuring interproject critical path analysis was done

  • Getting updates from remote engineering firms in different time zones

Results

  • With CAPPS, weekly status updates were done by the project managers and submitted to the project controls team for approval in P6

  • Monthly cost updates and forecasting of EAC were done by the project managers and submitted to the project controls team for approval in P6

  • Key management milestone reporting was streamlined significantly

  • Project controls teams were freed up to deal with larger turnaround projects

  • Project controls teams were able to focus on P6 re-scheduling and critical path analysis

CAPPS Updating Major Infrastructure Projects

CAPPS was used on large infrastructure projects to help with timely updates.

weekly updates with costs and resources

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Founded in the early 1900s, the client provides a wide array of engineering and consulting services throughout the United States, known for its range of services, industry expertise, and commitment to delivering innovative solutions.
Running large infrastructure projects that are highly time sensitive requires easy updating of P6 project schedules. This is not easy to do when you have highly specialized suppliers and contractors scattered around North America.

Challenges

  • Timely updates from multiple specialty engineering, suppliers and contractors

  • Weekly status reporting including costs to date and estimate at completion

  • Updating resource usage and forecasting on a weekly basis from over 15 specialty suppliers

Results

  • CAPPS was deployed to key project managers and suppliers

  • Weekly updates were prepared and reviewed in meetings prior to submission to keep the communication flowing smoothly

  • Used percent complete, resource usage and cost to date

  • Reporting improvement and better forecasting was achieved

CAPPS Makes Updating Hundreds of Projects Easy

Remote PMs get updates in on time with CAPPS

Remote Project Managers get updates in on time

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

When managing a multi-million, country-wide building upgrade and retrofit program with over 150 project managers, getting timely updates is very challenging.

Challenges

  • Getting bi-weekly status updates from 150 remote project managers was taking over a week to accomplish

  • Capturing monthly costs in a timely manner to get the program reporting reviewed and validated without major overtime for the project controls team

  • Ensuring consistent updating of key milestones and schedule slippage analysis

  • Getting all PMs to take responsibility for the updates and the timelines and understanding inter-project dependency impacts

Results

  • P6-Loader was used to clean up project templates for some 500 projects in play to acquire consistency

  • CAPPS is used for weekly updates by over 150 PMs

  • The project controls teams review and approve all updates in P6 and discuss any anomalies with the PMs right away

  • CAPPS is allowing meeting updates to run more efficiently with the on-screen grid

  • Program management reporting is now being done with a lot less stress and overtime

  • P6-Calculator allows for flagging of variances and easy filtering of late and overdue items for the schedulers to find across hundreds of projects

CAPPS - v10 Release

Introducing CAPPS Version 10.0

Release brings user controls and layouts to the tool

May 27, 2020

Introducing CAPPS Version 10.0

Release brings user controls and layouts to the tool

New Features

  • On-Screen - Layout Saving

  • On-Screen - Column Controls

  • On-Screen - Filtering Controls

  • On-Screen - Sorting Controls

  • On-Screen - Tab Controls

  • Configurable - P6 Columns for Baselines, Total Float

  • Configurable - Columns to Include UDFs and Codes

Enhancements

  • Performance Improvements

  • Support for Brave Browser

  • Notebook Improvements for Feedback

CAPPS - v09 Release

Latest release makes updating and approving easy

February 4, 2020

Latest release makes updating and approving easy

New Features

  • On-Screen - Approvals

  • On-Screen - Rejections

  • On-Screen - feedback status data

  • Configurable - Pre-Filtering for users

  • Configurable - database interactions

Enhancements

  • Performance improvements for extracting and loading into CAPPS

  • Support for Chrome Browser

  • Support for IE 10 Browser

  • Technology changes and enhancements