Learn how refinery used P6-Loader and TAPS to improve accuracy and speed when working with data in their P6 schedules and how they used EP-datawarehouse and custom dashboards to help with cost control and management visibility for their turnarounds.
Cost controls more effective and schedule updating more streamlined
Written by Sue Hopkins
Client Overview
Client is one of North America's largest integrated energy companies. Their Lima refinery was looking for a way to improve their turnarounds and create custom dashboards for better visibility for management.
Challenges
Their Lima refinery was looking for a way to have more effective cost controls for their turnarounds.
They needed a way to streamline data entry and schedule updating and reporting.
Results
Emerald's Turnaround Productivity Package - TAPS, P6-Loader, EP-dashboard, and EP-datawarehouse was implemented
Schedule updates are now completed in less than a quarter of the time. Updating takes a matter of minutes using TAPS, rather than several hours
P6-Loader streamlined the addition of found work to both the working schedule and the baseline schedule
EP-datawarehouse is used to store snapshotted data for multiple uses for EV and Trending
EP-dashboards utilize the snapshot data to create custom dashboards for management including Green-Ups, Inspections and S-Curves
From Our Customer
Coming in at 6am instead of 4am each day made a big difference to our team; not only on a daily basis but by not being exhausted at the end of the turnaround. TAPS saved 600 grueling hours.”
The client is a large cancer research hospital in California. They use Primavera tools for portfolio and project management across the program management, IT and capital projects teams. The IT team was finding that the system was not giving them the project status and resourcing information they were hoping for. Nor could they ascertain what the resourcing, in-house and outsourced, capacity and efforts were for the short and long-term planning.
Challenges
Developing a new project management structure with new projects, upgrade projects and ongoing support work
Transparency for resourcing across multiple departments - reworking of roles, resource codes, employee ID from PeopleSoft
Overhauling the EPS, OBS, CAS, and WBS templates after completing workshops
Results
Led design sessions for changes to global structures, stage gate templates, and consistent deliverables
Remapping and migration was done with P6-Loader after each working session so management could see the changes right away
Training was delivered by Emerald using custom developed UPK content and small working sessions for the different business leaders and then team project managers
Management Dashboard for timesheet submissions, project stage gate and milestones from templates were developed
As Canada's largest potash mining organization with over 20 mines in North America, managing global production supply is critical. Planning daily production, weekly short outages and monthly maintenance days while implementing larger capital projects and major shutdowns is very challenging. Using spreadsheets and lists was not working particularly well for production planning and productivity analysis in real time.
Challenges
Consistent coordination of Shutdowns and Capital Projects in short work windows while maintaining production and productivity forecasting
Detailed scope planning and resource planning across underground and above ground skilled resources
Easy updating, forecasting and realtime earned value analysis during the shutdown work and contractor productivity
Results
Realtime updates from Oracle E-Business EAM into P6 for Projects, Work Orders, Tasks and Resources allowing for easier plan development for maintenance work, mini-outage work, turnaround work windows and capital programs across several plants
Implemented within 6 months including dev, test, QA, and production. P6-Loader was used to move the P6 coding structures, EPS, OBS, codes, UDFs, and resources in a matter of minutes and to maintain these environments.
Better analysis of planned resource requirements, spending planning and timeframes across the capital programs throughout the plants
Improved delivery on outage deadlines, timeframes and what-if capability particularly related to managing production capacity across the plants
Better understanding of mining equipment and productivity rates for improved forecasting. Reduced effort to build the schedules, allowing better management of the short 1-2 power outage windows.
P6-Calculator ensured auto-archiving of the projects and work orders to keep the P6 database clean and manageable and to produce rollup data for resources and flagging of integration changes
Oil exploration company uses P6-Loader to migrate to Primavera P6 with speed and consistent data.
Proactive Not Reactive Portfolio Planning
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
Client is involved in the exploration, development and production of crude oil and gas in Colombia. They had numerous drilling projects that were being managed principally from SAP with difficulty.
Challenges
SAP was providing data too late to effectively manage projects
Spending overruns were common
Rig planning and completions forecasting was not reliable
Results
Implemented P6 for planning the drilling program
Migrated from SAP report into P6 - used the P6-Loader to load in projects, WBS, and costs
Easy visualization and comprehension of the plan in P6
Consistent templating of data across the portfolio
Saved weeks of data entry
on Thursday, 17 December 2020.
Posted in Case Studies
Large oil and gas company uses P6-Loader to develop turnaround plans.
Moving to consistent processes and reporting
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
Large oil plant in Australia needed a more efficient way to develop their turnaround plans. This was typically being done by an outsourced engineering and contractor joint venture every 2 years. So each time different processes and team members were working with different methodologies.
Challenges
Struggling to build detailed schedules since they had to pull data from internal systems and contractor inputs and remap the data into standard template formats
Working with contractors during the turnaround providing updates in different ways
Results
Streamlined data imports by over 30%
Drastically reduced manual data entry by 50%
Improved standardized reporting during the planning stage and execution
Expanding P6-Loader’s use into other groups to improve the usage of P6
From Our Customer
We saved 6 weeks on our planning process, and were able to get feedback more quickly after using P6-Loader
Used the P6-Loader to move a client to the Primavera Cloud in two weeks.
In 2 weeks - all projects were ready
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
Project Management specialist overseeing a large building remediation program after Hurricane Sandy needed to move from on-premise P6 program development to the Primavera Cloud to share schedule information with Contractors and Owners Representatives.
Challenges
Setup a new P6 environment in the Primavera Cloud within 2 weeks
Transfer all P6 program data for over 750 projects in a standalone PPM database
Over 400 baselines needed to be moved as well
Results
Emerald provided P6-Loader aaS
Enterprise Data: built and loaded for EPS, OBS, Users, User Profiles
Global Data: merged and cleaned up while loading over 400 Resources and 50 Calendars
Project Data: 756 projects, 455 Baselines, 265,802 activities. Activity codes, resource assignments, and relationships were all transferred.
Approach - used a combination of XER and P6-Loader functionality
Saved weeks of manually re-creating global data, users/profiles, and baseline management. Went live 1 week after getting files.
Large Australian rail company uses the P6-Loader to integrate SAP to Primavera P6.
Monthly cost loading made easy for hundreds of projects.
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
Large railway projects need a tremendous amount of coordination and strong scheduling. Managing monthly costs and updates from several regional contractors so that shareholders can be informed of status can be a challenge.
Challenges
Gathering updates from contractors working in remote regions to keep forecasting accurate
Ensuring costs were captured and validated against the schedule performance
Results
Streamlined the efforts of updating down from 4 person weeks to 2 person days. Data Imports by over 30%.
Errors and mismatches were reduced significantly
Several macros made this extract and upload much more reliable than manual inputs
Reloading every day during the update window was smooth
From Our Customer
SAP to P6 updates were easy to perform so that forecasting was much more accurate.
We integrated Aveva with P6 to drastically reduce the time our client spent updating their capital projects
Simplifying Engineering Updates
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
One of Canada's many potash companies runs all their capital projects with P6. With one scheduler on the team, it is difficult to keep up with the dozens of projects on the go to ensure monthly reporting is accurate.
Challenges
Updating some 20+ projects in P6 was time consuming at the end of each month
Mid-month reporting was not easy to do without spending extra hours to get all the updates into P6
Going over the updates with the extended team took a lot of coordination to schedule with so many people with different schedules
Results
Integrated documents statuses from Aveva
Templated the different task types and package types with preset calculation methods
Documents planned, in progress, completed, deleted
Set the start dates of tasks in progress, updated the percent completes and flagged changes to the tasks
Moving to a new environment allowed this company to archive older projects and cleanup old and corrupt data while upgrading to the most recent version of P6.
P6-Loader made it easy
Written by Sue Hopkins
Client Overview
The client is a large Canadian producer, transporter and marketer of natural gas, oil and natural gas liquids. They use P6 for many project controls functions including their capital program. After years of working in a P6 database they wanted to move to a clean P6 environment.
Challenges
Their IT department needed assistance in Upgrading and Migrating Major Projects and Facility, Engineering and Construction databases to a new environment
Their Security Profiles, User and Global Data, some of which were corrupt needed to be cleaned up prior to move to new environments
Move large live projects with up to 100 baselines to the new environment in a short amount of time while users were not active
Results
Databases edited and cleaned up prior to migration. Including Security Profiles, User and Global Data, some of which were corrupt using P6-Loader tool
Archived old projects in place and moved over 400 projects and baselines to new environment with only one weekend of down time
Migrated data was validated and compared to previous database to ensure all data was moved accurately
Saved hundreds of hours of manual work
on Friday, 18 December 2020.
Posted in Case Studies
Large Pre-Fab Manufacturer uses P6-Loader to get control over their planning, scheduling and cost controls.
competing priorities resolved
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
Calgary pre-fab manufacturer with international projects needed to get better control over the planning, scheduling and cost controls of several hundred projects on the go at once for wide ranging clients.
Challenges
Fabrication team was swamped and priorities were unclear
Change orders were impacting priorities
Needed a common approach to planning 250 projects on the go
Results
Used the P6-Loader to develop P6 Structures - EPS/OBS/Cost Accounts
Fully templated program
Cost Loading Changes with Overhead, Profit tracking
Daily Costing Reporting
on Thursday, 17 December 2020.
Posted in Case Studies
Suncor Energy is a Canadian integrated energy company based in Calgary, Alberta. It specializes in production of synthetic crude from oil sands.
Thales Group is a French multinational company that designs and builds electrical systems and provides services for the aerospace, defense, transportation and security markets.
Challenges
Suncor wanted good technology for their turnaround reporting and for S-curve reporting. They were also having to hire a full-time employee just to work on charts in Excel, and it was wasting both time and money.
A few years ago, Thales was struggling with graphics and other, similar charting issues to Suncor. Creating their graphics in Excel was taking a lot of time, and they were struggling with limited visibility into their data.
Suncor already had chart types, so in implementing EP-dashboard, we had to change our charts in dashboard to match the coding that Suncor uses.
Results
Better visibility as to where things were going wrong, really helped them understand their progress Set it up for two turnarounds in a row because they liked it so much they wanted it for the second turnaround
Greater visibility - now they could analyze workback and understand backlog vs. availability, and could see how much work they had currently and, subsequently, how much they could feasibly take on.
From Our Customer
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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.
