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.

In January when the oil prices fell below 50$ a barrel, many of our Calgary clients started re-evaluating their capital project plans to get the most out of this year’s investments. One of our clients was planning to invest in significant pipeline infrastructure and progress on a drilling program with 6 drill rigs on the go at any given time. The client needed to rearrange priorities and reduce this year’s plan down to 3 rigs and decrease main trunk line development.

Many people confuse Project Management with Project Portfolio Management and with Strategic Portfolio Management, as though they were virtually interchangeable terms. They are not.

Emerald Associates recently attended the 8th International Petroleum Technology Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in December 2014.

The conference was held in the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre not far from the site of the famous Petronas Towers and drew over 10,000 attendees.

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)?

One of our consultants who is currently loading large amounts of P6 data using Emerald’s P6 Loader came to me with a concern that there is sometimes a lag between loading information using our P6 Loader (via the API’s) and it appearing in P6, even if he repeatedly pressed the F5 (Refresh) key. The lag could be minutes or hours depending on the situation.

Primavera Unifier has a powerful security model that can be challenging to administer. It allows modeling roles by using groups and assigns roles to users by adding them to those groups. In addition, permissions can be granted to groups. The thing that makes it difficult to administer is that each project and shell has its own groups.

The release of version 10.1 marks a new milestone in the progression of Primavera Unifier as an international product. It’s a tough choice between whether the introduction of multi-language capabilities or the significant changes in the P6 Integration functionality is our favorite improvement.

In our last update we discussed the installation of the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA). Today I am writing to share an update on our latest project milestone, the connection of the ODA to the ZFS storage appliance.

Working in the field is such an amazing and rewarding experience. I recently returned from a large turnaround project that was implemented by one of Emerald’s largest customers in Fort McMurray.