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Articles tagged with: P6-Loader

P6-Loader v10 - New Release

Version 10 of the P6-Loader now uses the Cloud API, a programming platform developed by Emerald to allow our apps to work with either the P6 API or the P6 Web Services. It also streamlines restoring and reassigning baselines and initiated support for the new P6 v20 objects.

May 3, 2021

Written by Ravi Wallau

Version 10 of the P6-Loader now uses the Cloud API, a programming platform developed by Emerald to allow our apps to work with either the P6 API or the P6 Web Services. It also streamlines restoring and reassigning baselines and initiated support for the new P6 v20 objects.

New Features

  • Restoring and reassigning baselines streamlined

  • The P6-Loader now uses the Cloud API, a programming platform developed by Emerald to allow our apps to work with either the P6 API or the P6 Web Services

  • The resource spread periods can now be imported correctly - in some cases, the spread information would not be imported correctly

  • Baseline projects can now be moved across projects more easily

  • A baseline can be assigned as the current baseline of the project in the baseline sheet itself

  • New Primavera v20 objects - financial period calendars, new role rates, resource assignment and role codes

Enhancements

  • Better session handling. The P6-Loader will disconnect properly from the P6 database when a session is no longer needed.

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P6-Loader News Articles

P6-Loader Videos

P6-Loader Case Studies

on Monday, 03 May 2021. Posted in News, P6-Loader

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

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Program Management Case Studies

EPCM Case Studies

P6-Calculator Case Studies

CAPPS Case Studies

P6-Loader Case Studies

CAPPS News Articles

P6-Loader News Articles

P6-Calculator Videos

CAPPS Videos

P6-Loader Videos

on Monday, 26 April 2021. Posted in Case Studies

Large US Refinery Implements Emerald Tools

Learn how this 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 P6-Reporter (previously 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

  • P6-Reporter 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.”

-Ken Admire, Lead Planner/Scheduler

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TAPS Case Studies

P6-Reporter Case Studies

Oil and Gas Case Studies

P6-Loader Case Studies

TAPS News Articles

P6-Reporter News Articles

P6-Loader News Articles

TAPS Videos

P6-Reporter Videos

P6-Loader Videos

on Wednesday, 24 March 2021. Posted in Case Studies

IT Portfolio Management in P6

IT Portfolio Streamlined with PeopleSoft and P6

8 weeks to develop integrated system

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

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

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Custom Training Case Studies

Integrations Case Studies

Program Management Case Studies

Primavera P6 Case Studies

P6-Loader Case Studies

P6-Loader News Articles

Primavera P6 Videos

P6-Loader Videos

on Tuesday, 23 March 2021. Posted in Case Studies

Moving from SAP to Primavera P6

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

The client is involved in the exploration, development and production of crude oil and gas in Colombia. Their projects often involve upstream activities, including drilling new wells, enhancing production techniques, and managing existing assets. They focus on maximizing the value of their resources while maintaining efficient operations. 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 Primavera P6 for planning the drilling program

  • Migrated from SAP report into Primavera P6 - used the P6-Loader to load in projects, WBS, and costs

  • Easy visualization and comprehension of the plan in Primavera P6

  • Consistent templating of data across the portfolio

  • Saved weeks of data entry

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Primavera P6 Case Studies

Oil and Gas Case Studies

P6-Loader Case Studies

P6-Loader News Articles

Primavera P6 Videos

P6-Loader Videos

on Monday, 22 March 2021. Posted in Case Studies

Integrated E-Business EAM to P6 for Multi-Plant Resource Scheduling

Oracle E-Business EAM Integration to P6

Global Production Management with P6

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

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

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Mining Case Studies

Integrations Case Studies

Program Management Case Studies

P6-Calculator Case Studies

P6-Loader Case Studies

P6-Loader News Articles

P6-Calculator Videos

P6-Loader Videos

on Monday, 22 March 2021. Posted in Case Studies

Turnaround Planning with Outsourced Contractors

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.

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Oil and Gas Case Studies

P6-Loader Case Studies

P6-Loader News Articles

P6-Loader Videos

on Sunday, 21 March 2021. Posted in Case Studies

AVEVA to Primavera P6 Engineering Document Integration

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 Primavera 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

  • Updated the resources - actual labor units

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Mining Case Studies

Integrations Case Studies

P6-Loader Case Studies

P6-Loader Videos

on Sunday, 21 March 2021. Posted in Case Studies

Moving to the Primavera Cloud Made Easy

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.

Learn More

Program Management Case Studies

P6-Loader Case Studies

P6-Loader Videos

on Sunday, 21 March 2021. Posted in Case Studies

SAP Integrated to Primavera P6 with the P6-Loader

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.

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Integrations Case Studies

Transportation Case Studies

Primavera P6 Case Studies

P6-Loader Case Studies

P6-Loader News Articles

Primavera P6 Videos

P6-Loader Videos

on Sunday, 21 March 2021. Posted in Case Studies

Calendar Rolldown using P6-Loader

In this short video, we will briefly discuss and demonstrate the rolldown of calendars from the global level to the project level in Oracle Primavera P6 using the P6-Loader. Take a look to see a guided walkthrough showing how this useful utility works.

The P6-Loader is a custom Primavera P6 add-on tool that was developed by the team here at Emerald Associates in order to simplify the process of loading, extracting, and updating Oracle Primavera P6 data, ensuring the process is smoother, easier, and much faster. Nearly every data element available in Primavera P6 can be imported or exported using this flexible and secure tool, saving both you and your team precious time and frustration. In addition, the P6-Loader boasts multiple helpful utilities that allow you to easily clean up and work with your data in Primavera P6. Even better, with its user-friendly and intuitive nature, it is easy for anyone to learn and use. Cloud-enabled and Oracle Cloud marketplace approved, Emerald's P6-Loader can help to make your job a whole lot easier!

Interested in finding out more about how the P6-Loader can help you and your team? Take a look at some of the links below!

Learn More

P6-Loader Videos

P6-Loader Case Studies

on Thursday, 18 February 2021.

Creating EPS and OBS with P6-Loader

In this short video, we are going to take a quick look at setting up a new Primavera P6 database using the P6-Loader. Specifically, we will demonstrate the creation of an empty Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS) and an empty Enterprise Project Structure (EPS) in a brand new database, using information from an already existing database.
The P6-Loader is a custom Primavera P6 add-on tool that was developed by the team here at Emerald Associates in order to simplify the process of loading, extracting, and updating Oracle Primavera P6 data, ensuring the process is smoother, easier, and much faster. Nearly every data element available in Primavera P6 can be imported or exported using this flexible and secure tool, saving you and your team precious time and frustration. In addition, you can use the P6-Loader to help you clean up your database, as well as deal with the information you already have in Primavera P6, such as Global Data. Cloud-enabled and Oracle Cloud marketplace approved, P6-Loader can make your job a whole lot easier!

Interested in finding out more about how the P6-Loader can help you and your team? Take a look at some of the links below!

Learn More

P6-Loader Videos

P6-Loader Case Studies

on Thursday, 18 February 2021.

P6-Loader: Usage Sheets

P6-Loader is a custom Primavera P6 add-on tool that was developed by Emerald Associates to allow you to easily extract any data out of Primavera P6, as well as load information back in to P6. Additionally, it has many useful utilities to help you work with data residing in P6.

In this short video, we are going to take a look at usage sheets in P6-Loader, and how they can assist you with the clean up of your P6 databases. Check it out to learn how you can easily identify what is in need of cleaning up, as well as locate any duplicates that may exist in your database.

Learn More

P6-Loader Videos

P6-Loader Case Studies

on Tuesday, 16 February 2021.

Large Energy Company Migrates to Clean Primavera P6 Environment

The daunting task of cleaning up 10 years of projects was made easy with P6-Loader so archiving, cleaning, fixing and upgrading could happen.

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 the P6-Loader tool

  • Archived old projects in place and moved over 400 projects and baselines to a 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

Learn More

Primavera P6 Case Studies

Oil and Gas Case Studies

P6-Loader Case Studies

P6-Loader News Articles

Primavera P6 Videos

P6-Loader Videos

on Thursday, 17 December 2020. Posted in Case Studies

Fabrication Program Management

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

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Manufacturing Case Studies

P6-Loader Case Studies

P6-Loader Videos

on Wednesday, 16 December 2020. Posted in Case Studies