Financial Period Reporting using Primavera P6 and P6-Reporter

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.

When P6 is used as a tool for comprehensive project portfolio management, this aggregated information can provide a high-level view of a business unit or corporate plan that is of strategic value to upper and C-level management. For this reason P6 is often used as a source of information for generating financial or budgetary reports on a monthly cycle that is aligned with the company's other financial period reporting.

There are challenges, though, in using P6 data in this way. As an operational tool, the information in P6 is constantly changing. Project managers and schedulers are familiar with the concept of the data date to divide what is known from what is projected, and of utilizing an update cycle to get a coherent view of the data in P6 across an entire project. It is no good to have the activities in one WBS updated to February 1 and another updated to February 8. A similar concept is required when generating multi-project financial reports. All projects included in the report have to be updated to the same data date in order to provide a consistent, meaningful report.

This can be problematic for a few reasons:

1. The march of time is relentless and inexorable. The data in P6 is going to be changing as the project is ongoing. Reporting off the live P6 data is not an option. A copy of the data must be captured and that copy used for reporting to prevent the management reports from constantly changing.

2. There is always some lag between what is done and when that is reported. Getting the updates for the previous month in takes time -- it can take days or even up to a week or more in some organizations. So it is no good to capture January's reporting data on February 1st. Only after the updates are in can the data be captured.

3. Different projects are run by different managers and not all projects might have their data ready for reporting at the same time. As each project becomes ready for reporting, its data needs to be captured independently from the status of any other project.

Emerald Associates' P6-Reporter (previously EP-datawarehouse) is a reporting database product that meets all of these challenges:

1. P6-Reporter is comprised of a reporting database and a tool that populates that database from P6 using a process called snapshotting. Reports are written to run against the P6-Reporter database rather than the P6 database. Once the P6 data has been snapshotted into P6-Reporter, changes in P6 will not disturb the reporting data already snapshotted into P6-Reporter.

2. P6-Reporter's snapshotting is very flexible. It allows the user to define the period for which a snapshot is being taken, and that period does not have to be the same as the current period. In effect, it allows snapshots to be "backdated". That gives the project managers and other project contributors time to get the project updates in and ready for reporting before taking the reporting data snapshot.

3. With P6-Reporter, each project's data is snapshotted independently of other projects. If Alice gets her monthly closeout done quickly, she can be working her project in P6 while Bill is still waiting for straggler updates to come in.

We have used P6-Reporter for this kind of reporting with several clients and I have seen it consistently deliver high quality monthly reports. It adapts to the way our clients work and it does not force them to compromise report quality to do so.