Accidental deletion of important data is something that happens. Everyone has done it at some point.

In Primavera P6 EPPM, some of the most common cases of accidental data deletion are:

• Deletion of the wrong resource
• Deletion of the wrong project
• Deletion of the wrong WBS node or nodes

Your project schedule will be created in P6, and you are looking to provide the best schedule tools for your project team. What can you add to your team tool kit to assist the project team, address building the schedule, monitor schedule quality, utilize options for updating the schedule and make reporting quick and easy? Let’s look at a few examples for some food for thought.

Often on a Turnaround, or any large project, you need to report resource availability and requirements in your schedule by Craft (trade) and Company. But often, that’s not how the resource dictionary hierarchy is set up. How do we solve this problem? Well, an easy solution to the reporting requirement is using resource codes.

The cancel function has been long available in TAPS Classic and has now been added to TAPS Mobile. Just how easy is this function to use? This easy:

Step 1 – Enter your credentials and Sign In.

TAPS is not just a tool to streamline P6 project file updates. Are you looking to monitor and report on earned value (EV) at the resource level? P6 out of the box (OOTB) calculates EV at the activity level. Using TAPS Classic or Mobile provides some additional background calculations which are available for monitoring and reporting from P6 itself or from P6-Reporter (if you are using that tool). Even when multiple resources are assigned to an activity, the EV calculated in P6 OOTB is at the activity level. With EV calculations at the resource level you can gain more insight into where you may need to step in because a subcontractor is struggling (for example). With any issues easily identified, the assistance required can be coordinated and implemented to help bring activity progress closer in line with the execution plan as well as document lessons learned to prevent repeat occurrences.

Access your self-serve Project Detail Dashboard for easy to digest project information (displayed below in Tableau). Just choose the project and snapshot you want to view using the filters at the top left corner of the dashboard. The project displayed in the dashboard below is a drilling project. This example is food for thought on reporting options available for your projects.

Your P6-QA metrics are now available in Power BI reports. You can also create custom reports via our P6-Reporter tool.

Are you processing updates to your schedule manually and think that is the best option? I recently assisted a team with a project where, in order to complete the project schedule updates in an acceptable timeframe, their company decided to hire additional people just for the updates. I understand the time constraint they were under, but for follow-up projects, there are more efficient, less costly options available that also keep your updates less prone to data entry errors. One example is TAPS Mobile. 

TAPS Mobile allows update processing from your mobile device. That may not sound like a high-impact item, but keep in mind, every time data has to be handled, it is a labor spend (time and dollars). There is also the introduction of another data touch point where a data entry error may occur. You can streamline the update process by submitting updates directly from a mobile device. Instead of filling out a report and then inputting those updates into the project manually, consider completing your status checks, inputting the information into your mobile device, and clicking save to send the update(s) directly to P6. This streamlined update process can provide additional time to analyze the schedule updates. Proper schedule analysis is an important step and can get severely crunched if the entry of schedule updates is not streamlined but instead a labor-intensive, time-consuming process.

Often we need to compare and analyze multiple scenarios for our projects. Using P6-Reporter (previously EP-datawarehouse), we can store a snapshot of each scenario. These snapshots can be compared directly using P6-Reporter. The user can compare assignments as well as costs. Let’s have a look at an example of rig assignment scenario comparisons. Utilizing P6 scheduling functionality, build the scenarios in P6. Once the scenarios are created, create snapshots of the scenarios in P6-Reporter.

Taking snapshots can be an automated process, but you can create them manually as well. Creating a snapshot manually is easy to accomplish.



Complete the required updates in your P6 schedule and then create a snapshot.

To create the snapshot, go to the projects tab in P6 and set the 'P6R - Snapshot - Period' (previously 'EP-dw – Snapshot – Period’) and the 'P6R - Snapshot - Run' (previously ‘EP-dw – Snapshot – Run’) fields.

Easy access to up-to-date, easy-to-digest reporting is available by including Power BI reports on your projects. Keep the process convenient and streamlined to allow your team to focus their efforts on the project while simply digesting the dashboard reports. P6-Reporter (previously EP-datawarehouse) brings with it a set of standard reports. That does not mean the users are confined to that specific set of reports. As additional reports are added to P6-Reporter, you will have access to all the new reports as well. You and your team can also add to the P6-Reporter report collection by creating additional reports yourselves. These options put you and your team in a position to not only fill all reporting requirements on your project but to streamline your reporting and improve project communication.

In this blog, we will look at couple of examples in Tableau and Power BI. These dashboards are not an all-inclusive list but meant as food for thought.   

This blog is a deep dive into what can be accomplished with codes using P6-Scrubber prior to importing an XER/XML file. Frequently, when importing a schedule from an outside source into our existing database, there are codes we want to either delete, rename or, in the case of activity codes, rolldown to the project level. P6-Scrubber is able to handle all of these cases.

In P6-Reporter, the Portfolio Summary Self-Serve Dashboard provides easy access to portfolio level information. In the screen shot below, the user has summary information for all the projects in the portfolio displayed. Across the top of the dashboard are easy-to-use filters allowing the user to filter for exactly the information they need to focus on if the entire portfolio is not their current focus requirement. The report date indicates the snapshot information being displayed, and the user can filter for other snapshots if required. Previous snapshots remain available for display. Keep in mind, the snapshot process can be automated or manual.

Although TAPS was originally developed to assist with the large number of updates that need to be processed into a turnaround schedule for every update, do not limit your imagination! TAPS can be used to process updates to schedules other than just turnaround schedules. Consider where this tool can assist in addition to updates on turnaround schedules. Keep in mind that TAPS is also available on mobile devices.

Below is just one of a large number of scenarios for how TAPS can be used.

We all have had it happen in P6. Somehow, a project or global data goes missing or gets changed and we need to restore data from a backup. Usually, this means contacting the IT department and having them restore, at the very least, a previous version of the project or even the entire database. Our IT departments are busy, and often, P6 is not the only software they are supporting. Sometimes, this means we need to wait to get our data rolled back to a previous backup copy, which may not be convenient. In some cases, a full backup may need to be restored instead of just the one project we need which causes extra work to get the changes made to all those other unaffected projects.

P6-Loader now has the functionality to automatically create XML and/or P6-Loader XLXS format backups of projects and global data and provide a means in which to self-serve restoring data from a given time. The backups can be set to run daily, weekly or monthly and can easily be accessed and downloaded through P6-Loader.