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Articles tagged with: Utilities

Utility Company Uses P6-Scrubber to Clean P6 Files

P6-Scrubber helps utility company clean P6 schedules prior to importing them in their production environment

Client Overview

The client is a multi-faceted utility company that has multiple business units. They own and operate many substations and transmission lines that form part of the Alberta interconnected electric system. They provide water and wastewater services to more than 85 communities and industrial sites across Western Canada. The client also operates in the US and serves more than 780,000 people across 42 communities and 18 counties in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, making it one of the largest private regulated water utilities in the U.S. Southwest.

Challenges

  • The scheduling teams' interactions with outside contractors and consultants required the team to receive schedules to import. They required a way to clean the schedules prior to import so the data does not collide with other business units.

  • Each team required different rules for contractors and consultants, such as prefixes and what parent tree to land resources when imported.

Results

  • P6-Scrubber was deployed for the team to make the cleaning effort easier, more reliable and faster to handle.

  • The users setup the scrubbing definitions for the contractor and consultant loads, import an XER/XML file into P6-Scrubber, run P6-Scrubber which does the cleanups and then import the projects into P6 Production after the P6-Scrubber has done the cleanups

Emerald Helps Utility Company Move to the Oracle Cloud

Learn how Emerald helped client clean up Primavera P6 and move to the Oracle Cloud.

Client Overview

The client is a multi-faceted utility company that has multiple business units. They own and operate many substations and transmission lines that form part of the Alberta interconnected electric system. They provide water and wastewater services to more than 85 communities and industrial sites across Western Canada. The client also operates in the US and serves more than 780,000 people across 42 communities and 18 counties in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, making it one of the largest private regulated water utilities in the U.S. Southwest.

Challenges

  • The client needed to consolidate several Primavera P6 databases, both shared and standalone, to move to the Oracle Cloud.

  • They needed the ability to manage appropriate levels of user access to the data for different business units once the databases were combined.

  • Required the ability to support and execute the Capital Delivery Model (CDM) with Phases and Stages defined.

  • Each business unit had different schedule requirements that were sometimes unique that needed to be maintained.

Results

  • Emerald analyzed the different databases and proposed business rules and clean up recommendations for each business unit and then consolidated the P6 databases into one database.

  • Business unit and user security rules were implemented to ensure data was secure and accessible to only the users who needed to access the schedules within each business unit.

  • Implemented schedule templates for each business unit that followed the corporate CDM requirements and provided consistency across the company for data analysis and reporting.

  • Analyzed each business unit requirement. Created naming conventions for individual requirements and consolidated shared attributes for corporate wide data.

  • Emerald used their P6-Loader tool to make the necessary adjustments for security and data changes that allowed the implementation to take much less time than manually entering the new and updated data in P6.

  • After going live, Emerald continues to provide Primavera support in the Oracle Cloud to the client adding new users and maintaining their environment.

PCM-Archiver Used to Archive Client Data in PCM

Learn how the PCM-Archiver helped client extract data out of PCM

Energy company used PCM-Archiver to extract data, attachments, and PDFs from PCM

Written by Dan MacMillan

Client Overview

Client is a subsidiary of Michigan’s largest electric and natural gas utility, serving 6.8 million of the state’s 10 million residents.

Challenges

  • Want to sunset Primavera Contract Management, which has been unsupported for years and has security issues, but it has information that's crucial to keep for legal reasons.

  • Need to keep custom field data.

  • Need to know who attached files, and when, in case it's needed for future dispute resolution.

Results

  • PCM-Archiver extracted all record data, attachments, and PDFs of the default form into an archive location on the filesystem that doesn't need Primavera Contract Management, or any other special software, to access.

  • PCM-Archiver extracted an Excel spreadsheet for each document that includes custom fields, as well as all other fields, on both the header and line item levels.

  • PCM-Archiver included a tab in the extracted spreadsheet for each document with attachments that includes information about who attached each file and when.

Global Engineering Consultant Enhances P6 Usage

Learn how Emerald's tools are enhancing this Engineering Consulting Company's use of P6

P6-Loader and P6-Auditor provide the means to Enhance P6 Usage

Written by Sue Hopkins

Client Overview

Power Engineers is a global consulting engineering firm that offers complete and multi-discipline engineering, architecture and program management services.

Challenges

  • Power Engineers needed a way to easily administer multiple P6 databases and also update many projects on each update cycle.

  • Administration challenges were maintaining users and user profiles, and global data like activity codes.

  • On the updating side, updating actual costs and maintaining cross project relationships between contractor and owner schedules after each update cycle was really time consuming and error prone.

  • Administrators needed an effective way to view audit information in multiple databases for their large user base.

Results

  • One administrator is able to handle all user and codes maintenance for 10+ databases.

  • P6-Loader allows the team to continue to cost load much more quickly each month.

  • Handling cross project relationships is much less error prone now after receiving XERs from contractors on each update; it is a simple extract logic, change the project reference and reload!

  • The project controls team is able to tackle problems that they could not prior.

  • P6-Auditor has allowed them to keep a finger on the pulse of their schedules and gives them a means for disaster recovery.

From Our Customer

"P6-Loader enables me to do things that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do. It facilitates the ability to tackle problems that the infrastructure doesn't support. P6-Loader has been a quality and service enhancement."

John Moorman - Project Control Manager

P6-Calculator and P6-Reporter Makes Power BI Reporting a Breeze

Major North Eastern utility company uses P6-Reporter and P6-Calculator to improve their reporting.

regulatory metrics management

Client Overview

Major North Eastern utility using P6 to plan transmission and distribution maintenance and projects. The team needed to improve their ability to ensure that regulatory deliverables were being met while managing the deliverables in a more balanced and consistent manner.

Challenges

  • With hundreds of projects on the go across several states with different regulatory reporting requirements, setting standards across the team for consolidated management reporting was needed

  • Ensuring that regulatory commitment dates are met within the month, quarter and year was critical but very time consuming to manage

  • Giving the P6 scheduling team a quick way to find missing P6 information for coding and tracking milestone commitment dates was needed

Results

  • Using P6-Calculator to flag and count key in-service milestones within P6 and then snapshotted for use within Power BI

  • P6-Loader was used to cleanup manually created data that was used in the reporting to set up standards

  • P6-Reporter automatically snapshotted the reports every Monday at 8am to give management current reports for the weekly status meeting

  • P6-Calculator did automatic quarterly and monthly flagging for easy data validation across P6 and Power BI

  • Produced overall project metrics, in-service monitoring, construction readiness, and scheduling team production reporting

  • P6-Auditor allows for ongoing metrics for schedule performance on update counts to avoid bottlenecks and back dating tasks

Monitoring Large P6 Groups with P6-Auditor

P6-Auditor helps find users who made mistakes in P6

Deleting and editing global data happens; P6-Auditor can help

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Large Electrical Utility with several P6 databases with internal and external scheduling teams needed a way to manage and report on functions inside P6.

Challenges

  • With a large team of P6 users, it is hard to track down when projects are deleted

  • Ensuring that the EPS does not get changed when users are cutting and pasting projects was a challenge

  • When managing a resource pool of over 10 thousands crews, making sure your resource dictionary is maintained and coding kept up to date with more than one admin can be error prone

Results

  • Tracing project deletes easily and rollbacks if required

  • Reporting on update frequencies - actual starts, actual finishes, and percent completes

  • Edits to the resource dictionary that were not expected including deletes and cut and pastes

  • Verifying changes to activity codes and who made them as well as when they were made

  • Tracing EPS moves that no user admitted to

  • Finding logic changes that should not have been made as well as task deletes

PIMS -> P6 Integration

Integration between PIMS and Primavera P6 ensures quality compliance reporting for large electrical company.

compliance reporting made easy

Written by Nicole Jardin

Client Overview

Supplying Electricity to clients throughout Alberta requires strong program management. Ensuring that all regulatory reporting is complied with in multiple jurisdictions with differing rules and requirements can be a challenge.

Challenges

  • Ensuring regulatory reporting compliance was up-to-date and accurate on a daily basis let alone for monthly reporting

  • Managing changing conditions was difficult to ensure all stage gate reporting reflected these changes

Results

  • Integrated to PIMS key milestones for stage gates

  • Ensured consistent reporting - and reduced errors significantly

  • Automatic integration on project creation with templates with estimate dates

  • Within 4 weeks system was running

  • Cloud and on-premise integration

Maximo to P6 Integration

Integrating capital projects and maintenance work orders from Maximo to P6 allows detailed planning and resource management within P6.



Integrating capital projects and maintenance work orders from Maximo to P6 using Maximo IFACE tables and EAI P6 Cloud API to allow detailed planning and resource management within P6. Create new tasks from P6 via Maximo Web Services when schedulers needed to add additional supporting tasks to the schedule and update tasks from P6 to Maximo via Informatica when the tasks are scheduled in P6.
  • Projects - creating/update projects using a standard P6 template by geography and project type
  • WBS - create/update work orders in weekly maintenance planning and yearly project planning. Update statuses
  • Tasks - create/update/delete from work order tasks developed by engineering
  • Resources - create/update resource crews as new ones are added to Maximo
  • Resource Assignments - create/update resource assignments from Maximo. Allow P6 team to control hours as needed
  • Steps - update summary data from work orders on summary tasks in projects for easier reporting and management
  • P6 → Maximo - allow P6 to create tasks in Maximo for certain work types and update project start and finish dates