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.

There are some issues that we observed when upgrading from the 15.1 release of Primavera P6 to version 15.1.6. When we ran the setup.exe file for P6 15.1.6 it did not change the build number after we logged into P6 client.

I woke up with little stress or angst the other day despite the fact that I knew we were replacing a memory module on Emerald’s Primavera-in-a-Box solution that was running production workloads for a client in the energy industry.

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.

The Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is part of Oracle’s flagship Engineered Systems that are designed to optimize the entire hardware and software technology stack to deliver extreme performance, reliability and high availability. Now while there are many advantages, we want to highlight how much this system reduces deployment and database provisioning time down to a few hours compared to the multiple weeks it would take using traditional legacy systems.

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.

Recently, we were asked by a potential customer about adding support for Materials Delivery documents to the PCM Loader. Because the development of the PCM Loader has been customer driven, we always welcome the opportunity to consider adding support for new document types.

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.

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.

I have been involved in scheduling a turnaround recently, and I was assigned the task of making changes to the existing Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). One of the changes consisted of adding a repetitive new element to existing nodes of the WBS. I started this task by utilizing the features in Primavera that add and indent elements to a WBS, including the add plus sign and the navigation arrows on the Move tool bar.

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.

Unifier 10.1 has given each user the ability to customize their user experience based on their region. Users are able to select which language, time zone, date format, and number/currency formats they wish to work with. There are currently 11 different languages available for a user to choose from.