Primavera Software Training and Consulting

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Here you will find articles based on classroom topic discussions that are not sufficiently explained or documented in the standard Primavera Training course materials.  All articles that appear here are available on the download page.

 

Creating Import Configuations in Primavera P6

 

Quite a few students begin working with P6 before they attend class. At times, this makes for interesting classroom situations since these students want answers to real problems. Recently, during a discussion on importing data, a student brought up his situation. He was sending his schedule to a subcontractor who was updating durations and relationships. When he imports the schedule from the contractor, new relationships are added. However, invalid relationships  that the contractor deleted remain and he was updating these manually. He could have addressed this problem by using a different import configuration.

 

We will use a three activity project to demonstrate this. In this Test project, Activities 1,2 and 3 are linked sequentially in Finish-to-Start relationships:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Test is exported so the subcontractor can update it. The sub changes the relationship between Activity 1 and 2 to a Start-to-Start and sends it back to the scheduler, who imports using the Update Existing Project as the Import Action.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the Update Project Options, he uses the default configuration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you click Modify you will get a dialog for setting options. Update existing means that the import will add any new data but any old data remains; it is not deleted. The result is the scheduler’s project now has two relationships from Acitivity 1 to Activity 2. One is the original Finish-to-Start and the other is the Start-to-Start added by the subcontractor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To get only the subcontractor’s relationship, the scheduler could create a new import configuration by clicking Add on the Update Project Options. In this configuration named Relationships, the Delete checkbox is checked for Relationships.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By using this new configuration, the project will import the new Start-to-Start relationship and delete any other relationships.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The delete flag does not work on any of global data items, but you can experiment with other options the cells (such as changing Update Existing to Do Not Import for unwanted items) . The result in this case is the project imports with the subcontractor’s change and relieves the scheduler of a lot of manual work.