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.

Are you finding when you are importing or exporting a large number of projects that not all the projects are coming across when they are imported?

While converting a client from P6 V8.3 to V15.2, we found the data was not always transferred completely when we migrated large numbers of projects. Instead, with XER file sizes larger than 100,000 KB not all projects were exported and/or imported. We confirmed this recently on a subsequent project with a different client where we were migrating projects from P6 V7.3 to V17.12 and encountered the same issue.

In the first case, we exported the projects using an XER. Our file was over 300,000 KB. We found 4-5 projects were not exported. When we imported the same file, there were 2-3 additional projects that were not imported to the new database.

We looked at additional files for the same client and found that in XER files with a size larger than approximately 100,000 KB there were several projects in each XER missing when the file was imported.

Once we reduced the number of projects in the exported XER files to keep the file size under 100,000 KB, we found no projects were lost and our data was accurate.

Keep an eye on XER files larger than 100,000 KB when importing and exporting, they may not have complete data in them once they are imported.

Safran Software is a leading provider of Enterprise Project Portfolio Management and project risk management software solutions to project and asset-intensive industries.

Safran Risk has been developed by the same team that developed Pertmaster. They looked at where the industry is going and designed Safran Risk to be the next generation of probabilistic analysis tools - one with the unique ability to create both cost and schedule risk models and map the two together.

This software has been developed with a visually appealing and accessible user friendly interface, with a fully integrated scheduling environment. Safran Risk has been identified by Dr. David Hulett as the only commercially available solution capable of supporting his “Level 5” risk maturity level. Safran Risk also allows for seamless integration with Oracle Primavera (P6) and Microsoft Project tools.

• Near real time modelling of all cost and time variables concurrently
• Seamless and robust cost risk analysis
• Innovative reports to provide additional insight into risk impacts
• Comprehensive risk correlation including probabilities and impacts
• The intuitive Safran Risk interface encourages best-practice processes

When updates are done from remote locations, it is sometimes hard to know if the scope of work is on track or not. In P6, we have the idea of variances against a baseline, but sometimes it is even more practical to compare variances against the current schedule or the last update.

Wondering how exactly? After your updates have been entered into your schedule, run the P6-QA Tool. This tool performs many checks, including one to track Activities Completed Late.

In P6, identifying which projects are using each Activity Code in a quick, consolidated, easy to use manner is challenging. Especially when you consider some clients have a LOT of baselines.

But is this is r-e-a-l-l-y information we need to be able to capture? In my experience, there are a number of scenarios where that answer is a resounding “Yes”! One common example – the Activity Codes Dictionary needs to be cleaned up.

When you are working on a project and you move from Project into Support, sometimes it is hard to decide the exact cutoff point for the project team to start charging to the new support project. I had a problem the other day where I needed to decide the end date and cut over. The client selected a date a few weeks before we had thought we were going to cut it off after she checked her budgets and we realized we were going to go over.

So I had to go back to look through the timesheets we had submitted in Team Member to get the time reallocated before sending it into our QuickBooks where we invoice from.

Hearing a lot about ‘digital transformation’ lately? Digital transformation can be defined as the acceleration of business activities, processes, competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and their impact in a strategic and prioritized way.

What elements are included in your digital transformation plan? Can your team afford to ignore new technological advancements? Planning a strategic and prioritized path forward to fully leverage changes and opportunities in digital technology can have a very positive return on investment. The digital transformation for a company varies from company to company and can be a large project encompassing many different elements depending on said company and its current state.

Here's an example of leveraging changes and opportunities new technologies can provide. Say your team uses Primavera P6 for Project Management, yet doesn't use P6-Loader, P6-QA Tool, CAPPS or TAPS (barcode updating), and P6-Calculator for any efficiency gains, are you getting the best out of the tool. In many surveys conducted over the years by Oracle and Primavera, P6 is highly underutilized with 100% of clients using P6 for scheduling, 60-70% for resource management and only 30-40% for cost management and earned value analysis.

Emerald Associates specifically designed our productivity tools to address pain points users commonly encounter when using P6 so you can do better managing your projects and get more out of the project team.

P6-Loader

• Automates manual data entry through the secure import and export of most data elements between Primavera P6 and Microsoft Excel.
• Allows for the controlled extract and upload of data at the global and project level and eases the challenge of manipulating your project data by leveraging the spreadsheet functionality of Excel.
• Goes above and beyond the built-in import and export functionality in Primavera P6. It has also become a desired replacement for the outdated Primavera SDK (Software Development Kit). Now, with version 4 being cloud enabled, it is quickly becoming a desired tool to help with migrating to the cloud efficiently. With close to 1 Billion of transactions pushed through the system, it is making teams worldwide more productive.

P6-QA

• Removes the burden of manual schedule and business process analysis by automatically identifying deficiencies in Primavera P6 schedules based on scheduling best practices, industry standards, and user introduced business process requirements.
• It is unlike other third party Primavera schedule validation tool because it seamlessly integrates directly into Primavera P6 itself, allowing for the improvement of project management skills and scheduling quality in real-time. The P6-QA tool can be run at a preset interval such as weekly or monthly, or on an as-needed frequency to maximize your P6 schedulers’ ability to self-critique and ensure effective quality control.
• When your resident engineering team is your frontline reviewers, this tool makes their role much easier and more efficient saving you a lot of time getting your contractors schedules reviewed, critiqued and hopefully approved so you know if the project is still on track without an expensive team doing a lot of analysis. When you are reviewing schedules every few weeks on a project this is significant in time savings as well as the time freed up to address any issues on the project.

CAPPS

• Lets the remote users and likely non P6-Experts to get the project updates into P6 from wherever they are and whenever they have a moment. This means waiting for updates once a month is a thing of the past. Taking 2 weeks every month to get your portfolio updated is a thing of the past. Real-time statusing is doable with variances and deviations able to be highlighting and interjected into the schedule as they are happening making your forecasting, change management and claims avoidance mush more effective.

TAPS

• The Turnaround Progressing System; it uses barcode scanning technology to eliminate the need for lengthy manual data entry when updating your Oracle Primavera P6 schedules. Simply use a barcode scanner to find, start, update or cancel any activity within the schedule in two quick scans.
• Status updates can be done 75% faster while increasing your team's accuracy, since there's no chance of manual data entry errors. The first scan finds the task and the second scan starts, finishes, and statuses the task with any of the percent complete types available in Primavera P6.
• The progressing flexibility along with the ability to calculate and report Earned Value at the resource assignment level makes TAPS a strategic enhancement for all Primavera P6 users.

P6-Calculator

• Performs calculations that are traditionally unavailable in Primavera P6.
• Automatically performs calculations on data in P6 to present information to users that would otherwise be difficult for them to see, improving visibility and digestibility of complex P6 data and enabling better decision making.

All of the above tools are available on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

This is just one small example of an opportunity to leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and claim the positive rewards of their impact. Help your team work smarter, not harder by empowering your team with the best tools!

Are your deviation requests and approvals an entirely manual process? Do you have an easy electronic cross reference between activities in your schedule and specific Deviation Requests?

CAPPS – Take Center Stage!

Oracle Prime uses the Cost Breakdown Structure (CBS) to track, manage and report costs in the Cost Sheet page. Costs in the Cost Sheet can be viewed in the base currency or the project currency.