Ideas in Oracle Prime:

Use Oracle Prime to create ideas: capture, evaluate, and process the ideas for new initiatives and business endeavors.

Ideas are processed using a submission and approval workflow. Prime Projects provides a default workflow for processing ideas, or you can create a customized workflow. First the idea creator creates an idea and specifies the idea's business case. When an idea contains sufficient information, the creator can submit the idea for further processing by routers and owners.

Emerald Associates is well known in the US and Canada for our homegrown add-on tools for Primavera P6. We have assisted numerous companies in many diverse areas to get the most out of their P6 software. You may wonder how our tools can assist in the Department of Transportation (DOT) field to get more done in P6 with less time while still providing useful data to your stakeholders and remaining good stewards of the public's funds. Our tools will help you do more work in less time, so that your project management group has more time to analyze and perfect their schedules.

Manually wading through a schedule and looking for errors is time consuming and prone to human error. Not only that, it's boring. No one wants to do it, but you need to check your schedule for errors!

Even worse then working through your own schedule for errors, is slogging through a contractor's. When you don't know how they have built the schedule, it can take days to make sure things hold together. Some of our clients have several layouts, reports and even special access databases and outside tools to do this which is very time consuming, error prone and boring.

We have all experienced at one point or another how tedious (and time consuming) setting or changing resource availability can be in the P6 resource dictionary. Particularly for an example like the one we will walk through where you are setting up or adjusting turnaround resources and the weekend rule happens to be ½ crews.

P6-Loader can ease the pain of these types of tasks.

In P6, identifying each specific project using each of the Global Calendars in a concise, fast, easy to use manner is challenging. Some may think this is not necessary very often, but in my experience, it has been quite the opposite!

Is this functionality already handled in Primavera P6, Client or Web? A very good question - let’s have a look.

You are correct; out-of-the-box P6 does not calculate Earned Value (EV) at the resource assignment level. It only runs EV at the activity level which is fine for a start, but what to do when you need to 'dig deeper' and analyze crew performance? You can't use Global Change to calculate the resource assignment EV because the activity percent complete isn't available in the Global Change list of fields.

A very simple option is to use TAPS to input your schedule updates. TAPS is P6 updating using barcodes (plus additional functionality). By using TAPS, updates are faster and more accurate giving you (and your team) more time for schedule analysis. Yes, TAPS runs EV calculations at the resource level.

When you have a large number of users in your P6 database, it is surprising how quickly that database can get “clogged up” with a lot of unwanted data. This happens even when using Sandbox databases, restricting privileges and every other trick you have thought of; long time P6 users know what I am talking about.

On every Turnaround there are Pre-Turnaround activities that do not get done prior to the actual Turnaround and need to be moved into the Turnaround phase of the schedule.

The challenge is how to record actual hours earned in the PRE phase vs the TA phase, since a large number of these activities already have earned hours associated with them. Simply moving the activities would decrease the reporting of hours in PRE and create earned hours in TA for work that was actually done in PRE.

This can be done simply and quickly with P6-Loader.

In deploying our Emerald Primavera Contract Management (PCM) Productivity Cloud, we got the vanilla PCM installed and added our PCM add-on utilities for line numbering controls. Then we added some of our P6 and PCM automations to move change documents between the two systems.

To be on the safe side, we took backups and renamed databases, but we couldn't have predicted what would happen next...

This is part 2 of a series of blogs discussing best practices of P6 archiving. In Part 1 we discussed the question of time:

• How long should you keep a P6 project file?
• How do you track the date to archive your P6 project?

Now we will discuss the question of location.

We get asked on a regular basis what the best way to archive P6 data is.

1. How long should a project file be kept?
2. What should be done with the project files when that time period has expired?
3. Where should they be kept?
4. How can we retrieve if we need them, especially with upgrades?

In this blog series, we’ll look at some of the options available to a P6 user and discuss the question of time.

Here are step by step instructions on how to upgrade your Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management (OPPM) environment to the new 16.1.3 version. To learn more about OPPM you can visit our product page.

Last week I logged in to my Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management environment and found that my items were in the wrong quadrants. Rather than having current tasks in my upper quadrants and future tasks in my lower ones, all my tasks were being broadcast as low priority and ending up at the bottom of the quadrant.

When working with resources in Primavera P6 Web version 16.x on, there is a new twist: the need to publish data. If you are trying to analyze resources and the following message displays, it's time to publish.

Over the last few years I have worked with many clients on turnaround projects in remote trailers on job sites that didn't have great connectivity. Now I am no techie, so I cannot pinpoint what causes the problem, but I know there is a problem when the coffee maker is the busiest place in the trailer. Now I am talking trailer coffee here folks, that stuff is gut rot at the best of times. If the planning team is hanging around, it is because they have been kicked out of Primavera P6 again!

In the current economy the mere suggestion of financial spends to address system issues are something that will elicit gasps, face palms and shocked facial expressions, let alone a few choice words. But during one of these “extended coffee breaks” I did some number crunching out of curiosity on what the downtime costs really were.