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 It has also become a desired replacement for the outdated Primavera SDK (Software Development Kit).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!

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.

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.

If you are a Java programmer, or if your organization has a Java programmer who is eager to learn about the Primavera API, there is a world of possibilities about what you can do with your P6 database. The P6 API is a powerful solution that lets you interact with the P6 database from a Java application.

Primavera Gateway is an integration web application being developed by Primavera that allows data to be moved between a Primavera application and another application. Primavera Gateway consists of an Integration Broker in the middle, and at least two providers, one for each application that is involved in the integration. All Primavera providers are built-in including the P6 Provider, Unifier Provider, Enterprise Track Provider and Prime Provider. Third-party vendors can create additional Primavera Gateway providers to integrate non-Primavera applications with Primavera applications.

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.