While working with a client the other day I was asked “when should we look at integration versus using a loader?”

I am not sure I answered the question particularly thoroughly in the moment, but thought it would be good to share some of Emerald’s surprising experiences related to both in our blog.

Recently, we were asked by a potential customer about adding support for Materials Delivery documents to the PCM Loader. Because the development of the PCM Loader has been customer driven, we always welcome the opportunity to consider adding support for new document types.

We had the opportunity to install and evaluate the latest version of Instantis EnterpriseTrack Version 9 in our demo environment. Instantis EnterpriseTrack is a cloud based project portfolio management solution provided by Oracle Primavera with the key feature of quick and easy deployment.

When creating reports using the current layout for the activity table in Primavera P6, we know that layouts can be customized depending on the information we want to display. These types of reports can be modified as they are built; they can be grouped, filtered, sorted and summarized for reporting purposes. You can also view summary information for the displayed columns per your criteria or your specific job requirements. But what happens if we want to merge different information into a single column? Or when we need information in the detail window that is not available as an option to be displayed as a column in our layouts?

Through the learning process there are always requirements that are not as obvious or easily implemented as we may think. For instance, neither relationship type nor lags are available as columns for our layouts. How can we make this process happen and do it in the most efficient way possible?

In chatting with a colleague, they expressed some of the difficulties they were experiencing in properly scheduling fleet maintenance shop work using their fleet management software. Our discussion centered around their maintenance process and the information they needed to track in order to streamline servicing/maintenance on the units in their fleet.

There were many difficulties being experienced with pain points such as (but not limited to) misplaced vehicle. For example, a vehicle was brought in for service, but did not arrive when it was scheduled to be in the shop (sometimes arriving early, sometimes late), or once in the shop, part requirements were discovered which necessitated the vehicle having to wait (the bay was needed for other servicing activity). In moving the vehicle out and back into the service bay, the actual tracking and confirmation of status was getting lost.

Maintaining the same Security Profiles across multiple databases (or Primavera P6 instances) within your organization can be a huge pain if you want to keep everything in sync. You need to define your OBS structure, global and project profiles, and the association of users to global profiles and OBS nodes, and replicate that manually across your organization.

Creating matching security profiles is particularly tedious because the information is presented in P6 in checkbox lists which are hard to follow and very difficult to compare from one P6 instance to another. Version 8 is even more convoluted than Version 7, since the checkboxes are now tabbed.

I have been involved in scheduling a turnaround recently, and I was assigned the task of making changes to the existing Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). One of the changes consisted of adding a repetitive new element to existing nodes of the WBS. I started this task by utilizing the features in Primavera that add and indent elements to a WBS, including the add plus sign and the navigation arrows on the Move tool bar.

Last week, Oracle Primavera announced the latest release of Primavera P6, Primavera Unifier, Primavera Analytics and Primavera Gateway v15.1. The Primavera P6 EPPM API is a powerful set of Java API libraries that allow applications to interact with a P6 EPPM database while adhering to most of the business logic that one would encounter in P6 Web or in the P6 Professional Client. As a result, most of the P6 Service Packs and Fix Packs released include a matching version of the P6 API.

Unifier 10.1 has given each user the ability to customize their user experience based on their region. Users are able to select which language, time zone, date format, and number/currency formats they wish to work with. There are currently 11 different languages available for a user to choose from.

Many of our clients use Primavera P6 as one part of an integrated solution involving other systems. One common scenario is to bring labour actuals from a timesheet system or cost actuals from an accounting system into P6. This allows the projects team to see all of the project data in the tool they are familiar with and orients them around a project-major axis.

For one of our modular manufacturing clients, we built a nightly cost and labor integration from their cloud hosted accounting system into Primavera P6 EPPM. The integration loads actual hours and actual costs onto the P6 resource assignments from all internal office and shop team members’ timesheets. It also integrates Purchase Order line item costs onto the P6 expenses for externally procured services and materials, as well as internal product costs from bulk purchased inventory transfers.

When working with a client who engaged Emerald to assist with developing a detailed schedule for piping tie-ins on a major SAGD oil sands expansion project, we found that the old way of building field installation work package( FIWP) templates or fragnets (for those P3 users) and copying them in P6 was just not effective. We had built resource loaded templates in P6 and started replicating them by hand by ISO and FIWP. We had to develop the typical sequences, overlay the manpower loading, and coordinate for limited camp space through resource loading as well as handle shop limitations and deliveries from Ontario and the US.

Oracle has introduced a new feature to EPPM 8.4 that allows “multiple selection” on report filters. This is a great feature that adds a new dimension to the filters that can be created on reports. At Emerald Associates, we have already used the “multiple selection” capability on BI Publisher reports that we developed for clients recently.

One of the quirks we discovered when testing the multiple selection feature is that the user that runs the EPPM report has to be careful about how they select the values in the report filter drop down.

As any project manager or scheduler will tell you, Primavera P6 is a great tool for project planning and execution. P6 is designed to allow you to manage cost, schedule, and resource information in as much detail as you want. It allows you to know where you are on a project and what is coming up, potential issues, what absolutely must be done on time to prevent project delivery from being delayed, and so on. This is all tactical information and P6 has an outstanding feature set to help manage it.

The same information in P6 that has such tactical value can also have huge strategic value. The detailed schedule documents, not only when certain work will be done, but when specific resources such as labour, equipment, materials, and money will be required. Summarizing this time-distributed resource information to the project level or higher provides a big picture view of the project's projected resource and spend profiles over time.

Emerald has been doing a lot of work lately in the Turnaround space helping large oil companies efficiently plan and execute their Turnaround projects. Increasing productivity and efficiency has always been important for oil producers, but now more than ever we are seeing a higher demand due to the current market conditions. This is when Emerald’s Primavera add-on tools come into play. Emerald’s tools become truly indispensable when time, cost savings and the optimization of work processes are high priorities.