When we added the financial period dictionary to the v4 P6-Loader, I thought it was a waste of time and no one would really use it. With P6 having a wizard already to create financial periods, I thought that was good enough. Well, I was wrong.

After I wrote my last blog, a co-worker asked me why I would want to store period actuals in the data warehouse when it seems as though I can get the same value from the historical data in the data warehouse.

Both Oracle’s Primavera Analytics and our P6-Reporter (previously EP-datawarehouse) support capturing some kind of historical data – data that shows what the information in P6 looked like at some point in the past. It’s fairly easy to see how this historical data can be exploited to produce information that is in concept very similar to what you get from the financial period actuals.

Recently, while converting a client from P6 r8.3 to r15.2, we had to move a number of baselines to the new database. We used our P6-Loader to unassign and detach the baselines from the current project and then created XER’s to move them to the new database.

To our surprise, when we imported the baselines as projects into the new 15.2 database, the WBS elements were all messed up. Instead of one project with many WBS elements, our project appeared as many different projects, one per WBS, all with the same Project ID. They also appeared outside the EPS structure and P6 wouldn’t let us move them into the correct EPS node. Every attempt gave us the error that “ is not a valid integer value”.

P6 Time Distributed Data

P6 has two main sources of time-distributed data, spread data and financial period actuals. The main difference between these is that spread data is calculated, while financial period data is stored. This difference impacts both how accurate the data is and how flexibly it can be viewed.

We often have clients ask us the most efficient way to change out resource assignments. This often happens when work that is expected to be assigned to one resource gets assigned to another.

For example – I want to change the resources in a particular plant from my own staff and assign it to a contractor. In this simple example, I have decided to give all the trade work in one plant to Jacobs instead of performing with my own labor force. I want to remap the resource assignments as follows:

A client who we are currently upgrading to P6 v 15.1 has been complaining that the refresh is not working properly in P6 Professional (aka The Optional Client). This client had no issues with release 7.x.

We did some testing and found the same thing. Sometimes hitting F5 doesn’t reliably get a refresh.

We have had a number of complaints recently about the POBS imports really slowing down XER import performance and also complaints that the XER files coming out of Primavera P6 are huge.

Very few people realize that there are substring commands available in the P6 Global Change function (available in the P6 Client only).

Recently in a LinkedIn P6 group, a member was asking for help in renaming an activity UDF assignment. He had a large number of activities that he needed to change the UDF prefix on because of a plant renumbering. He had an existing UDF called Equip_ID and he needed to remove whatever the first character is and replace it with a ‘2’.

The Emerald team just completed a client migration to the Oracle Primavera SaaS Cloud. The client had over 1000 small (50-60 activities) projects in their on-premise Primavera P6 PPM v8.3.2. They needed to be able to share the projects for the next 2 years amongst a large collaborative program team with multiple contractors and engineering firms. This program is very high profile and reporting is paramount.

The Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is a powerful and affordable solution for any company that is interested in taking advantage of an engineered system, aimed at providing the best performance for an Oracle database. The Oracle database can run in a “bare metal” configuration, or it can run in a virtualized mode.

Working with P6 resource assignments and resource dictionaries can be extremely time-consuming. The task becomes especially tedious when it comes to planning a turnaround project with multiple daily shifts and varying crew sizes on day and night shifts, or a capital project where you have rotating work shifts with crews overlapping on the back shift.

We have been using v15.2 of P6, both EPPM and PPM, for 2 weeks now. I personally use the client or PPM the most. This version has been upgraded to 64 bit, and I can really see the difference in speed.

We recently had a support call from a client that started having performance issues with their P6 database during the pre-work phase of their turnaround. We looked at the Oracle 11.2.0.4 enterprise database and found a massive amount of archive logs being chewed up. In fact, it was on a scale of 1-2 GB of logs within 2-5 minutes on average. With that kind of volume it would not take long for a server to receive the dreaded Oracle error message ORA-00257: archiver error. When this happens the database usually needs more space on the device where the archive log files are stored, which results in the database not allowing any more transactions until the issue is corrected.

The P6-Loader is a unique Primavera enhancement tool developed by Emerald for the secure movement of data between Primavera P6 and Microsoft Excel. Many users are aware that P6 already has some built-in functionality, which is why I often hear this question from my students, as well as from my clients: How is the P6-Loader different from the built-in import and export functionality in P6 Client?

There are numerous differences between the two when it comes to choosing the right tool for importing/exporting your P6 data. Here are some of the main points to consider:

There has been a lot of excitement around the Emerald office with the release of Primavera P6 15.2. Emerald has been a Primavera partner for over two decades now and have come to learn that with each release there are some good surprises. Thanks goes out to Karen Pilla and the Oracle team for driving the next phase of developments on a mature product that helps project managers run some of the largest and smallest projects around the globe.