Save 5 Minutes Every Time You Cancel an Activity in Primavera P6

Whenever we have a client that is interested in TAPS, we always get the question about how an activity is updated to reflect that it has been cancelled. So, how does TAPS cancel activities?

Cancelled work is work that you have decided not to perform. Typically the turnaround (TA) team doesn’t want to delete the activity because that would change the baseline hours. On the other hand, they also don’t want to progress the activity which would earn hours.

TAPS will zero the activity out and mark it as completed – this ensures that the baseline hours remain the same but no hours are earned for work that wasn’t done. The process to cancel an activity takes mere seconds:

1. Scan the activity barcode
2. Scan the CANCEL barcode
3. Submit the request to save changes in P6

Now what? TAPS updates the activity name to add the prefix “CANCELLED-”and makes the following changes:

• Sets all “Duration” fields to “0” and adds the replaced value to a corresponding TAPS User Defined Field (UDF).
• Sets all “Percent Complete” fields to 100
• Sets all “Unit” fields to 0 and adds the replaced value to a corresponding TAPS UDF
• Sets all “Cost” fields to 0 and adds the replaced value to a corresponding TAPS UDF
• “Start Date” will be set only if the initial “Status” was set to “In Progress”, TAPS will use the following formula to determine the “Start Date”: Update Time – Planned Duration
• The “Finish Date” is set to the current Update Time
• An activity code or UDF can be set by a client within TAPS to indicate an activity has been cancelled. For example, create an activity code named “TAPS Cancelled work” and set it to “Cancelled” when the activity is cancelled using TAPS. If you already have an Activity Code that you use to mark cancelled work, TAPS can use that code
• If the “Dissolve Cancelled Activities Logic” option is selected when the activity is cancelled in TAPS, the relationships will be dissolved for the activity

One of our TA clients (a major oil and gas company) estimates that TAPS saves 5 minutes of data entry time every time they cancel an activity, HUGE in a turnaround. Now with the ability to use it over any device, we can save even more time.