When registering for Emerald’s Primavera training courses, people often ask these kinds of questions:

• What version of P6 is this training based on?
• If I am using version 7 (8.1, 8.2, etc.) at work, will it be OK for me to take the training course on the latest version?

The truth is the version does not really matter. Indeed, with each new release, Oracle is making enhancements and adding functionality to the tool, making it even more attractive for the end users in different industries. At the same time, the core functionality of the tool remains the same.

As we get ready to launch our P6-QA tool we were doing our final QA of field names, usability etc. and I was just not loving Ravi’s Portuguese or programmer naming convention, (Sorry Ravi). But before I went crazy and just started to change the names and break everything, I used our P6-Loader to extract all the Primavera P6 UDFs (User Defined Fields) from our demo environment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The benefits of integrating Primavera P6’s database with Microsoft Excel have long been a secret weapon of many advanced Primavera users. By leveraging spreadsheet functionality to manipulate project and enterprise level P6 data and avoid time consuming manual data entry, users are able to drastically increase their productivity and leave envious colleagues in awe of their P6 wizardry.

The Primavera Software Development Kit (SDK) is a legacy technology feature that is included with Primavera P6. It was released with P6 r3.0 (at the time known as P3e). It implements an ODBC driver that enables a connection between the Primavera P6 data store and other software such as Excel or Access. However, as the underlying P6 technology has advanced significantly in recent years, many are finding the old SDK tricks falling short in today’s Primavera enterprise environments. Some serious technical drawbacks of the antiquated SDK have made it a non-option for many Primavera client companies.

This is a very common and puzzling question for someone who is installing P6 on a single workstation and is only going to have a single user – should I go with P6 Professional, also known as Primavera Project Portfolio Management (PPM), or P6 Enterprise, also known as Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM)?