Integrating Accounting Systems With Primavera P6

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.

We created a Project Manager’s Integration Verification Dashboard so that each morning, the PMs can quickly see if the nightly integration was successful or if any issues occurred that needed their attention. To achieve the bottom up error handling and issue reporting we used the P6 Project Code Rollup Utility (now part of P6 Calculator). The tool does a “smart rollup” pushing Resources + Expenses onto the Activity and then up to the WBS and Project levels instantly. This tool enables the PMs to see the summary of the integration when logging into P6, and drill down into the activities for projects with integration issues. The Rollup Utiity handles costs, hours, dates, indicators and UDF values.

This tool saves so much time for busy Project Managers by eliminating the hassle of digging into all the layers of activities, resource assignments, expenses, WBS and projects to find what they need to investigate. It also gives senior management access to key information in the P6-EPPM portfolio views that would otherwise not be available in the web portlets.

I love the flexibility that this tool brings to our clients not only when we are rolling out integrations during testing and troubleshooting, but also long after Emerald has them up and running in P6-EPPM. If they decide that they need a new field rolled up that we had not originally planned for, they can get the rollups working in just minutes without any additional programming.