P6-Auditor helps find users who made mistakes in P6
Deleting and editing global data happens; P6-Auditor can help
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
Large Electrical Utility with several P6 databases with internal and external scheduling teams needed a way to manage and report on functions inside P6.
Challenges
With a large team of P6 users, it is hard to track down when projects are deleted
Ensuring that the EPS does not get changed when users are cutting and pasting projects was a challenge
When managing a resource pool of over 10 thousands crews, making sure your resource dictionary is maintained and coding kept up to date with more than one admin can be error prone
Results
Tracing project deletes easily and rollbacks if required
Reporting on update frequencies - actual starts, actual finishes, and percent completes
Edits to the resource dictionary that were not expected including deletes and cut and pastes
Verifying changes to activity codes and who made them as well as when they were made
Tracing EPS moves that no user admitted to
Finding logic changes that should not have been made as well as task deletes
Integration allows PMs to manage 20 projects at once
PMs get on top of projects with daily integrated system
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
Calgary pre-fab manufacturer with international projects needed integration to accounting and purchasing system to get control over client commitments and internal and external spending for hundreds of simultaneous projects.
Challenges
Tracking costs to date on hundreds of projects manually was too time consuming
Client forecasting was taking too long and overruns were being missed
Senior management was not getting the reporting done in a timely manner
Results
Integrated daily costs from Discoverer into P6 and PCM Contract Management
Updated the external contract and PO costs into expenses
Integrated the internal detailed resource costs into resources and forecasted onto the budget resource
P6-Calculator did all the cost rollups and comparisons to the budget
P6-Calculator flagged integration errors, mismatches, and potential incorrect charges for the PM
BI Reporting was developed for cost to date, forecasting, earned value, CPI, SPI and changes to-date
The client is a large cancer research hospital in California. They use Primavera tools for portfolio and project management across the program management, IT and capital projects teams. The IT team was finding that the system was not giving them the project status and resourcing information they were hoping for. Nor could they ascertain what the resourcing, in-house and outsourced, capacity and efforts were for the short and long-term planning.
Challenges
Developing a new project management structure with new projects, upgrade projects and ongoing support work
Transparency for resourcing across multiple departments - reworking of roles, resource codes, employee ID from PeopleSoft
Overhauling the EPS, OBS, CAS, and WBS templates after completing workshops
Results
Led design sessions for changes to global structures, stage gate templates, and consistent deliverables
Remapping and migration was done with P6-Loader after each working session so management could see the changes right away
Training was delivered by Emerald using custom developed UPK content and small working sessions for the different business leaders and then team project managers
Management Dashboard for timesheet submissions, project stage gate and milestones from templates were developed
Oil exploration company uses P6-Loader to migrate to Primavera P6 with speed and consistent data.
Proactive Not Reactive Portfolio Planning
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
The client is involved in the exploration, development and production of crude oil and gas in Colombia. Their projects often involve upstream activities, including drilling new wells, enhancing production techniques, and managing existing assets. They focus on maximizing the value of their resources while maintaining efficient operations. They had numerous drilling projects that were being managed principally from SAP with difficulty.
Challenges
SAP was providing data too late to effectively manage projects
Spending overruns were common
Rig planning and completions forecasting was not reliable
Results
Implemented Primavera P6 for planning the drilling program
Migrated from SAP report into Primavera P6 - used the P6-Loader to load in projects, WBS, and costs
Easy visualization and comprehension of the plan in Primavera P6
Consistent templating of data across the portfolio
As Canada's largest potash mining organization with over 20 mines in North America, managing global production supply is critical. Planning daily production, weekly short outages and monthly maintenance days while implementing larger capital projects and major shutdowns is very challenging. Using spreadsheets and lists was not working particularly well for production planning and productivity analysis in real time.
Challenges
Consistent coordination of Shutdowns and Capital Projects in short work windows while maintaining production and productivity forecasting
Detailed scope planning and resource planning across underground and above ground skilled resources
Easy updating, forecasting and realtime earned value analysis during the shutdown work and contractor productivity
Results
Realtime updates from Oracle E-Business EAM into P6 for Projects, Work Orders, Tasks and Resources allowing for easier plan development for maintenance work, mini-outage work, turnaround work windows and capital programs across several plants
Implemented within 6 months including dev, test, QA, and production. P6-Loader was used to move the P6 coding structures, EPS, OBS, codes, UDFs, and resources in a matter of minutes and to maintain these environments.
Better analysis of planned resource requirements, spending planning and timeframes across the capital programs throughout the plants
Improved delivery on outage deadlines, timeframes and what-if capability particularly related to managing production capacity across the plants
Better understanding of mining equipment and productivity rates for improved forecasting. Reduced effort to build the schedules, allowing better management of the short 1-2 power outage windows.
P6-Calculator ensured auto-archiving of the projects and work orders to keep the P6 database clean and manageable and to produce rollup data for resources and flagging of integration changes
We integrated Aveva with P6 to drastically reduce the time our client spent updating their capital projects
Simplifying Engineering Updates
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
One of Canada's many potash companies runs all their capital projects with Primavera P6. With one scheduler on the team, it is difficult to keep up with the dozens of projects on the go to ensure monthly reporting is accurate.
Challenges
Updating some 20+ projects in P6 was time consuming at the end of each month
Mid-month reporting was not easy to do without spending extra hours to get all the updates into P6
Going over the updates with the extended team took a lot of coordination to schedule with so many people with different schedules
Results
Integrated documents statuses from Aveva
Templated the different task types and package types with preset calculation methods
Documents planned, in progress, completed, deleted
Set the start dates of tasks in progress, updated the percent completes and flagged changes to the tasks
Large oil and gas company uses P6-Loader to develop turnaround plans.
Moving to consistent processes and reporting
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
Large oil plant in Australia needed a more efficient way to develop their turnaround plans. This was typically being done by an outsourced engineering and contractor joint venture every 2 years. So each time different processes and team members were working with different methodologies.
Challenges
Struggling to build detailed schedules since they had to pull data from internal systems and contractor inputs and remap the data into standard template formats
Working with contractors during the turnaround providing updates in different ways
Results
Streamlined data imports by over 30%
Drastically reduced manual data entry by 50%
Improved standardized reporting during the planning stage and execution
Expanding P6-Loader’s use into other groups to improve the usage of P6
From Our Customer
We saved 6 weeks on our planning process, and were able to get feedback more quickly after using P6-Loader.
Used the P6-Loader to move a client to the Primavera Cloud in two weeks.
In 2 weeks - all projects were ready
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
Project Management specialist overseeing a large building remediation program after Hurricane Sandy needed to move from on-premise P6 program development to the Primavera Cloud to share schedule information with Contractors and Owners Representatives.
Challenges
Setup a new P6 environment in the Primavera Cloud within 2 weeks
Transfer all P6 program data for over 750 projects in a standalone PPM database
Over 400 baselines needed to be moved as well
Results
Emerald provided P6-Loader aaS
Enterprise Data: built and loaded for EPS, OBS, Users, User Profiles
Global Data: merged and cleaned up while loading over 400 Resources and 50 Calendars
Project Data: 756 projects, 455 Baselines, 265,802 activities. Activity codes, resource assignments, and relationships were all transferred.
Approach - used a combination of XER and P6-Loader functionality
Saved weeks of manually re-creating global data, users/profiles, and baseline management. Went live 1 week after getting files.
Large Australian rail company uses the P6-Loader to integrate SAP to Primavera P6.
Monthly cost loading made easy for hundreds of projects.
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
Large railway projects need a tremendous amount of coordination and strong scheduling. Managing monthly costs and updates from several regional contractors so that shareholders can be informed of status can be a challenge.
Challenges
Gathering updates from contractors working in remote regions to keep forecasting accurate
Ensuring costs were captured and validated against the schedule performance
Results
Streamlined the efforts of updating down from 4 person weeks to 2 person days. Data Imports by over 30%.
Errors and mismatches were reduced significantly
Several macros made this extract and upload much more reliable than manual inputs
Reloading every day during the update window was smooth
From Our Customer
SAP to P6 updates were easy to perform so that forecasting was much more accurate.
The daunting task of cleaning up 10 years of projects was made easy with P6-Loader so archiving, cleaning, fixing and upgrading could happen.
P6-Loader made it easy
Written by Sue Hopkins
Client Overview
The client is a large Canadian producer, transporter and marketer of natural gas, oil and natural gas liquids. They use P6 for many project controls functions including their capital program. After years of working in a P6 database they wanted to move to a clean P6 environment.
Challenges
Their IT department needed assistance in Upgrading and Migrating Major Projects and Facility, Engineering and Construction databases to a new environment
Their Security Profiles, User and Global Data, some of which were corrupt needed to be cleaned up prior to move to new environments
Move large live projects with up to 100 baselines to the new environment in a short amount of time while users were not active
Results
Databases edited and cleaned up prior to migration including Security Profiles, User and Global Data, some of which were corrupt, using the P6-Loader tool
Archived old projects in place and moved over 400 projects and baselines to a new environment with only one weekend of down time
Migrated data was validated and compared to previous database to ensure all data was moved accurately
Fiscal year budgeting is easy with PCM-Loader. Build or rework in Excel and load it up.
program reporting success
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
San Diego Unified School District is the second largest school district in the state of California with an operating budget of over $1 Billion per year and serves more than 130,000 students in pre-school through grade 12. The district was a long time user of Primavera P6 and Primavera Contract Management (PCM), which were used to manage their construction and maintenance projects.
Challenges
Large amounts of budget data needed to be entered into Primavera Contract Management (PCM)
Budget Change reporting was not reliable
Results
Using Emerald's PCM-Loader tool, they were able to load in all of the budgets within just a few days
Easily reloaded the budgets when changed
Saved hundreds of hours
Reporting was correct and reliable
From Our Customer
“[We have] all of the budgets established using the PCM-Loader and that’s been a big help.” - Joel Splittgerber, Program Controls Manager
Integration enables the management of work orders, tasks, relationships, resources, and resource assignments; providing synchronized scheduling and resource updates.
Emerald Associates created Work Orders from SAP Hana Cloud into Primavera P6 Azure Cloud for detailed task and resource management in Primavera P6 using Mulesoft and the EAI P6 Cloud API. We created SAP Operations and supporting resources and resource limits as new resources are introduced in SAP.
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) - create/update SAP Operations into Primavera P6
Tasks - create/update tasks from SAP operations
Relationships - create/update relationships from SAP and allow Primavera P6 schedulers to change and update them back from Primavera P6
Resources - create/update for new crews in SAP and set limits
Resource Assignments - create/update resource assignments from SAP operations and sub-operations for detailed resource management
Primavera P6 → SAP - return operation and sub-operation lists and relationships to update SAP with Primavera P6 schedule information
Integrating capital projects and maintenance work orders from Maximo to P6 allows detailed planning and resource management within P6.
Integrating capital projects and maintenance work orders from Maximo to P6 using Maximo IFACE tables and EAI P6 Cloud API to allow detailed planning and resource management within P6. Create new tasks from P6 via Maximo Web Services when schedulers needed to add additional supporting tasks to the schedule and update tasks from P6 to Maximo via Informatica when the tasks are scheduled in P6.
Projects - creating/update projects using a standard P6 template by geography and project type
WBS - create/update work orders in weekly maintenance planning and yearly project planning. Update statuses
Tasks - create/update/delete from work order tasks developed by engineering
Resources - create/update resource crews as new ones are added to Maximo
Resource Assignments - create/update resource assignments from Maximo. Allow P6 team to control hours as needed
Steps - update summary data from work orders on summary tasks in projects for easier reporting and management
P6 → Maximo - allow P6 to create tasks in Maximo for certain work types and update project start and finish dates
Large Pre-Fab Manufacturer uses P6-Loader to get control over their planning, scheduling and cost controls.
competing priorities resolved
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
Calgary pre-fab manufacturer with international projects needed to get better control over the planning, scheduling and cost controls of several hundred projects on the go at once for wide ranging clients.
Challenges
Fabrication team was swamped and priorities were unclear
Change orders were impacting priorities
Needed a common approach to planning 250 projects on the go
Results
Used the P6-Loader to develop P6 Structures - EPS/OBS/Cost Accounts
Fully templated program
Cost Loading Changes with Overhead, Profit tracking
Integration between PIMS and Primavera P6 ensures quality compliance reporting for large electrical company.
compliance reporting made easy
Written by Nicole Jardin
Client Overview
One of the largest regulated electricity transmission providers in the province of Alberta, this client runs over 13,000 kilometers of transmission lines that deliver energy to a majority of Albertans. The company is also involved in various infrastructure projects aimed at upgrading the transmission network to meet growing demand and integrate renewable energy sources. Supplying electricity to millions of people throughout Alberta requires strong program management. Ensuring that all regulatory reporting is complied with in multiple jurisdictions with differing rules and requirements can be a challenge.
Challenges
Ensuring regulatory reporting compliance was up-to-date and accurate on a daily basis let alone for monthly reporting
Managing changing conditions was difficult to ensure all stage gate reporting reflected these changes
Results
Integrated to PIMS key milestones for stage gates
Ensured consistent reporting - and reduced errors significantly
Automatic integration on project creation with templates with estimate dates
