Managing A Turnaround Project With Primavera P6

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.

I was especially touched by the warm hospitality, openness and friendliness of the people I met there. We had an incredible project team that worked together exceptionally well to accomplish challenging turnaround tasks in a very dynamic, fast-paced environment.

Now being back to Calgary office (for a little while anyway), after working in Fort McMurray for about 2 months, I must say it is definitely very different from the field work. I really miss having to wake up at 4:00 am in the morning and making the 45 minute drive to the plant! As an implementation specialist at Emerald, we often go to different client locations, which gives us the unique experience of seeing P6 “in action” in so many different industries.

On this project we had many challenges, not so uncommon for an industry with large turnaround projects. Some schedule delays, some new found work, resources being redirected to other higher priority units, unexpected weather surprises, etc. Overall, I must say Primavera P6 proves again and again to be an indispensable tool when it comes to planning and managing a large turnaround project. I cannot imagine setting up and maintaining proper turnaround reporting and doing schedule analysis without P6. Having the right coding in place and having properly set up reports and layouts allows the management and the project team to see the “live” picture of the project and take prompt action as it is needed. Most importantly, it allows the planning and execution teams to be “on the same page” in terms of where the project is and what needs to be done to achieve the deadlines set by management.

I am looking forward to the next turnaround on this site and hopefully implementing some of Emerald’s add-on tools that will make some of the turnaround processes more efficient. For example, with the assistance of TAPS (Emerald’s Barcode Technology-Based Turnaround Progressing System) the updating process will be much faster and easier. It is critical during a turnaround to ensure fast and accurate updating of a project schedule. A Planner and scheduler’s time is precious and having to do manual updating after each shift takes a lot of time entering the information into P6. With the assistance of TAPS the updating time can be shortened to minutes, which gives the planning and scheduling team much more time for schedule review and analysis. With TAPS, a planner can simply use a barcode scanner to update any activity within the schedule in two fast scans.

Another tool that we plan to use is the P6-Reporter (previously EP-datawarehouse). Regular snapshotting of the key performance information and using it for analysis is vital. Using user defined fields (UDFs) for daily storage of key project performance data (i.e. variances, activity % complete information, etc.) is useful, however, in the long run such storage should be automated and a special data warehouse should be used for storing all key project data. Data from the warehouse can in turn be used for producing required graphs and charts for the management in minutes (e.g. Turnaround S-Curve, CPI/SPI Trending, Workdown Curve, Inspection Summary Reports, etc.).