Populating A P6 Activity Code Dictionary On The Fly

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.

I have been providing functional support to one of Emerald’s customers in Ontario, Canada, helping them with Primavera-related questions. On their recent Turnaround project there was a need to quickly build and maintain a massive list of work orders in P6. The list of work orders was in Microsoft Excel and needed to be entered into Primavera P6.

Using Emerald’s P6-Loader tool, we were able to upload the list of work orders into P6 in less than 15 minutes (over a thousand line items). In addition, manually adding relevant activity code values into the dictionary would have taken hours of work. We were able to quickly upload the new activity code values with the P6-Loader and immediately assign them to activities.

In the end, schedulers were able to allocate time for more important activities, such as schedule analysis and preparation of required reports. The next day the scheduling team was able to produce reports for management with the necessary activity coding in place. Having the P6-Loader also helped the team keep the work orders dictionary in Primavera up-to-date during the Turnaround, allowing the addition of new work orders quickly while ensuring data integrity.