Something we are asked is whether our P6-QA Tool is useful throughout the life cycle of your projects. Its use throughout the planning phase is obvious, of course; it helps with schedule development. Even after you’ve planned out your work though, the QA tool can help while you’re executing your plans. Let us examine a couple examples of how.

Keep in mind - it is beneficial to equip your team with the best tools for the job! Work Smarter, Not Harder!

I’m Ian Nicholson, VP Solutions at Emerald Associates. I have been working with Oracle Primavera Risk Analysis (OPRA) since 2001 when it was Pertmaster, Emerald being the exclusive Canadian distributor for Pertmaster until their acquisition by Primavera in 2006.

In this series of blogs, I will explain why I feel that all OPRA users should upgrade to Safran Risk (SR).

I’m Ian Nicholson, VP Solutions at Emerald Associates. I have been working with Oracle Primavera Risk Analysis (OPRA) since 2001 when it was Pertmaster, Emerald being the exclusive Canadian distributor for Pertmaster until their acquisition by Primavera in 2006.

In this series of blogs, I will explain why I feel that all OPRA users should upgrade to Safran Risk (SR).

I’m Ian Nicholson, VP Solutions at Emerald Associates. I have been working with Oracle Primavera Risk Analysis (OPRA) since 2001 when it was Pertmaster, Emerald being the exclusive Canadian distributor for Pertmaster until their acquisition by Primavera in 2006.

In this series of blogs, I will explain why I feel that all OPRA users should upgrade to Safran Risk (SR).

I’m Ian Nicholson, VP Solutions at Emerald Associates. I have been working with Oracle Primavera Risk Analysis (OPRA) since 2001 when it was Pertmaster, as Emerald was the exclusive Canadian distributor for Pertmaster until their acquisition by Primavera in 2006.

In this series of blogs, I will explain why I feel that all OPRA users should upgrade to Safran Risk Analysis (SR).

The Cloud is a remarkable and innovative tool. It connects people from around the world, allows us to share fun vacation pictures and adorable videos of our pets, and offers a massive network that can process any and all data under the sun.

But as anyone who's ever had to use the back end of a Cloud program can tell you, it can quickly get complicated, leading to far too many headaches and sleepless nights trying to figure out what's going wrong. We could tell many horror stories about hours spent hunched over our computers just begging our systems to work the way we want - and I bet you could too!

So when one of our clients approached us looking to evaluate their options with Cloud software, we knew how they felt. At the time, they had been using on-premise servers, but were looking to upgrade to a database with more features at a reasonable price. They had considered Software as a Service (SaaS), but found the price of such an upgrade to be too steep to be a realistic option.

Luckily, we had previously agonized over the same decision and were able to offer our personal server in the Cloud; EAI hosted by OVH, as an alternative with a much lower price than the SaaS system Oracle offered.

Our client was also in sore need of maintenance services. Before they came to us, they had been operating, maintaining, and repairing their own cloud servers with only a handful of IT specialists who were unfamiliar with Primavera to begin with. As you can imagine it was slow, frustrating work, and when things broke down it could be days before they got everything up and running again. So when we suggested the EAI server, they were quick to take advantage of our services.

Now that they've moved to EAI, our client is able to enjoy the benefits of Cloud without the hassle that comes with sustaining their database. Emerald Associates handles the maintenance, repair, and operation of EAI, and offers on-sight visits and training for our client's entire team so that they will have the familiarity with Primavera that is so crucial in today's business environment. We have been working together with this particular client for the past 3 to 4 years now to keep their servers in the Cloud running smoothly and efficiently, giving them the freedom to spend their time and energy on what really matters - their business.

We've all worked with frustrating, outdated software. It's a pain to try and get everything to work the way you want it to, and the task is usually just too important or time-sensitive to take a break from. Everyone knows where that leads - yelling, cursing, or just slouching down in your chair in defeat, bested by technology once again.

When I first started working with our new client, I started out as a general trainer for the company’s employees. Our work began with typical P6 stuff, nothing new or especially exciting, but it was the start of a longer, more involved relationship with our client. I started helping them with turnarounds back in 2013 and I've been doing turnarounds with them every year since. I recently finished my 6th turnaround with the company - an 11-12 week long process that honestly felt a lot longer than it was. Due to a problem organizing the order of units, we ran overtime, and that was unfortunately just one of the many issues we had to deal with during that turnaround.

As is often the case, a good amount of the complications we faced were unintentionally self-inflicted. Our client runs under an alliance contract umbrella with another organization that controls their project management and general processes. This organization had decided to do a major upgrade to P6 just a few weeks ahead of the turnaround execution. This naturally caused a lot of complications, as the workers involved in the turnaround had to do a lot of scrambling to figure out the bugs in the untested upgrades while simultaneously dealing with the turnaround itself, which was no easy task. On top of this, the upgrade to P6 wasn't just a standard upgrade - it was a move from version 6.2 to version 17, which is a big jump on any given day, but right before a turnaround... It was disastrous. There were all sorts of issues, including considerable trouble upon first-log in, and it created a lot of stress - way more than even on the typical turnaround! Units were in shutdown, people were pulling 12 and a half hour long shifts, the site was an hour away from where most of the personnel were stationed, IT issues were causing immense frustration - it seemed like everything that could go wrong did.

Now, I've been in quite a few panicked, rushed environments over my 8 years of turnaround assistance, and this could easily have been one of them, but luckily the majority of the schedulers dealt with it very well, keeping their heads despite the setbacks we faced. And as for me - I went in with my usual mentality: get it done. So despite the constant uphill battle, we managed to pull everything together and get through the turnaround with our sanity intact. Overall, it wasn't the easiest turnaround I've ever been a part of, but complications are part of the job, and I'm happy to say that another yearly turnaround with our client went by successfully - if maybe a little bumpier than usual!

Before becoming an implementation specialist at Emerald Associates, I was a project manager and P6 administrator in a state government transportation agency for several years. I was responsible for managing 50-60 Primavera P6-EPPM (Web) project schedules and monitoring them to schedule completion. These projects were for the engineering and design of highway projects including tasks such as road maintenance, new road construction, bridge maintenance, and signals upgrades.

We have been using P6 v18.x with several clients and have seen some differing behavior related to caching. It appears the problem may have started as early as P6 v16.x. These clients are in varying environments; P6 Oracle SaaS, EAI Hosted, and on-premise - In short, anywhere where Oracle Cloud Connect is utilized.

We were excited to see the new form of caching that appeared in v17.x. We have clients with poor internet access and P6Web is not adequate for their needs - they need P6 Client. Everyone knows that P6 Client is very chatty and needs good bandwidth to work properly, so the idea that we can cache data and do heavy lifting on our desktop rather than on the server far away was great.

Remember our good old friend the POBS Table? Well, we have a new friend in town that is introducing itself to our database in the form of the RISKTYPE table. We have discovered numerous clients are importing XER files to their database that include a large number of Risk Categories, sometimes tens of thousands of them. No one knows where they originated, but they are multiplying and wreaking havoc.

The problem comes when an export file is created with unwanted Risk Types and imported into another database, creating more values in the destination database. The destination database then could share their large number of Risk Types to another database. Each time, the RISKTYPE table is passed along, it grows, spreading and infecting more and more databases.

Are you importing schedules into scrubbing databases, taking out all the unwanted data you don't want to pollute your production database, re-exporting the schedule and then importing it into the database where it should have gone in the first place?

Do you have required specifications your contractors need to follow for their schedules, but have a hard time knowing whether those details are missing or incorrect until you've already imported them?

Do you want to ensure you are not importing POBS tables and corrupted RISKTYPE tables?

That's a lot of quality assurance to do! Maintaining your corporate data standards for dashboarding and reporting can be a full time job, especially when project teams have their own coding structures and requirements for their P6 Environment.

Don't worry; there's relief. Emerald has developed a new tool that will do all that work for you! We are now introducing P6-Scrubber.