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Saying Goodbye to Expedition 8.5 and Hello to Unifier - Part 2

A Case Study From A Technical Perspective

Alberta’s Capital Health was a big user of Expedition from the 1990s through to 2010. They had hundreds of projects that were sitting on a Sybase SQL-Anywhere server that needed to be retired, but they needed to have easy access to the documents related to these health care projects.

Emerald solved their problem using the PCM-Archiver. This PCM add-on tool automates the extraction process of all projects and documents, and in this case, ultimately saved the client approximately 140 hours of computing work. For a more in-depth understanding of this project and its results, please refer to Part 1 of Saying Goodbye to Expedition 8.5 and Hello to Unifier. In Part 2, we are going to explore a more technical perspective including some of the bumps we experienced along the way of extracting 1,213,318 documents, generating 1,123,318 Excel files, generating links for 39,384 attachments, and generating 91,236 PDF files!

Team Member Error - "Current Timesheet Period Does Not Exist"

How To Fix The Error in Team Member When Daylight Savings Time Kicks In

We recently turned our clocks forward an hour for the daylight savings adjustment. Today our users could not log into Team Member - they got an error indicating that the “Current Timesheet Period Does Not Exist”. What gives?

Saying Goodbye to Expedition 8.5 and Hello to Unifier - Part 1

A Case Study From A Functional Perspective

Primavera Expedition, now known as Primavera Contract Management (PCM), was a great tool in its day and still is as PCM. We had a number of clients who ran their entire capital program on the tool with hundreds of large and small projects.

Now that PCM is moving into the extended support phase, how do you get years of data out of the system and preserve it for future reference?

Primavera P6 Resource Leveling - Too Complicated? No Way!

In reading a P6 setup recommendation document for one of our IT program clients I almost fell off of my chair when I saw the recommendation for resource leveling. It said not to use resource leveling as it introduces too many variables into the scheduling process. For an IT group not to be using resource leveling in a program is crazy!

Believe it or not, we see this advice suggested a LOT.

Save 5 Minutes Every Time You Cancel an Activity in Primavera P6

Whenever we have a client that is interested in TAPS, we always get the question about how an activity is updated to reflect that it has been cancelled. So, how does TAPS cancel activities?

Cancelled work is work that you have decided not to perform. Typically the turnaround (TA) team doesn’t want to delete the activity because that would change the baseline hours. On the other hand, they also don’t want to progress the activity which would earn hours.

Primavera SaaS Cloud vs On-Premise - 2017 New Upgrading Models to Consider

Penguin Looking To The Cloud

We are working with a client who have been on the Primavera SaaS cloud for awhile and are now getting serious about migrating their dispersed team to the Oracle Primavera SaaS cloud for their P6 users. We are helping them with this process using our P6-Loader for P6 v16.2 in the cloud. We wanted to go with P6-EPPM version 16.2.3, since it has some crucial patches applied to it in the last 3 months and seems to be stable.

Then we get the news we were dreading, no you can't get that version you must upgrade to version P6 17.1? So we went to Oracle e-delivery to download P6 17.1 and guess what? It is not even released for on-premise use. So what is going on?

We had heard rumors that the upgrade model in the Primavera SaaS Cloud was going to change, but did not want to believe them. Now we cannot ignore them anymore.

The Fastest Way to Cancel Activities in Primavera P6

Automate the Process of Updating Cancelled Activities in Primavera P6 with our Barcode Updating Technology

When planning a turnaround project you want to make sure you include all the tasks that will happen and even those that might happen. This is a great strategy in the planning phase because during the actual turnaround, you don't have time to add all of the “potential” activities that become necessary.

Now the dilemma becomes, how to cancel the tasks that your team doesn't need after all.

You could process the updates for cancelled activities using manual data entry, dealing with logic, manhours, and baselines, but if you handle a lot of these it becomes time consuming, tedious and frustrating. Lets face it, during a Turnaround that is just not a good idea. You might think that dissolving is good enough, but is it?

IT Program Management with Primavera P6

An Example of P6 Mentoring, Coaching and Working Sessions

Primavera P6 Coaching

We have been working with a client using Primavera P6 for a large multi-year, multi-sprint IT project to revamp their customer loyalty program and overall customer experience. The team has been using P6-EPPM and have been aggressively putting together schedules for each key component of the program from infrastructure, to ERP, to integration testing and deployment.

This team is in large part new to P6, and they have been fighting to produce an overall program plan that has a continuous critical path so they can answer the usual question “when are we going to be done?”.

Oracle Primavera Analytics – Which Oracle Business Intelligence Edition is Right for You?

3 choices for Primavera Analytics

Oracle Primavera Analytics requires one of the following three Oracle Business Intelligence products, which must be licensed separately:

  • Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Foundation Edition
  • Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Extended Edition
  • Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Foundation Edition for Oracle Applications

Only versions 11.1.1.9.160719 and 12.2.1.1.0 of these products are supported with Primavera Analytics 16.2.

I’m using acronyms liberally in this entry for your and my benefit … these names are a mouthful!

  • Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Foundation Edition (OBISFE)
  • Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Extended Edition (OBISEE)

Of these three choices, two options do not impose supplemental restrictions on how you can use Oracle Business Intelligence with Primavera Analytics within your organization.

Getting Roles Onto Your Master Primavera P6 Plan - First you Have to Find Them

Do you find it tedious and time consuming to locate the resource assignments with missing roles?

binoculars

When you are building up your schedule it is easy to miss assigning roles to resources, especially if you did not use roles at first and are introducing them after the fact. Another common scenario is when you are importing contractors' P6 schedules and are merging them into your turnaround plan or a large capital program where you are reporting both on resources as well as roles for trades and discipline rollups.

P6 Activity IDs - Wow That is Some Interesting Numbering

Struggling With P6 Activity ID Consistency - or Should we say Lack Thereof?

A very common pain point when trying to align project schedules to company or project SOPs (standard operating procedures) is ensuring activity id breakdowns are consistent (as outlined in your company schedule business processes). This can be a real nightmare especially if you are working with multiple contractors and engineering firms all with different structures and standards.

Primavera P6 – Getting Your New Schedulers Up-To-Speed With Less Frustration

Give Your New Schedulers A Head Start with the P6-QA Tool

head start

Let’s help our new schedulers get up and running faster then ever before.

I love training up new schedulers. I've been a scheduling lead for years and always get a kick out of teaching new users best practices that I have learned the hard way.