Integrate with Primavera P6
If you’re planning to implement Oracle Primavera’s P6 EPPM enterprise tool suite, you have probably wondered how you are going to manage the integrations required to manage your business processes.
It’s common for a Primavera P6 deployment to involve integration – in fact, it’s rare that we work on an implementation where integrations are not an important part of the tool’s success. These days, organizations use a range of domain-specific, best-in-class tools and in order for business processes to work end-to-end, the data in each system has to talk to other systems.
The good thing about Oracle Primavera is that the API allows for integration… but without specialist knowledge of how to make the most of that, it can be complex to get your integrations working the way you want. And, of course, you need the same level of specialist knowledge about the other tools that make up your enterprise suite.
If you’re just starting planning for your other systems to integrate with Primavera P6, here are seven functional areas to consider.
1. Financial Systems
Your Primavera implementation may need to pull resource costs or equipment costs from your financial system. Or it may need to send back project budgeting information for the cost center, or resource utilization and timesheet data for invoicing clients. Either way, having access to accurate budget information, regardless of what system you are viewing at any given moment, is important for making informed management decisions.
2. HR Systems
In order to allocate resources to tasks, you need a complete list of employees. Maintaining a separate resource pool inside Primavera is possible, but it’s a big overhead and someone needs to be on top of managing starters and leavers. An integration with your HR tool ensures the resource pool is always up to date without human intervention.
Many HR systems will include useful information about reporting lines, which can be helpful for creating workflows and ensuring the right access for the right employee groups.
Tools like Oracle PeopleSoft can be further customized, making it even harder to get started with your data integration.
3. Project Management and Collaboration Systems
Some of your team may be using project management tools outside of Primavera, for example Microsoft SharePoint. Project managers may choose to create their project schedules in other tools like Microsoft Project.
Save time and reduce the risk of human error by integrating the two tools so every project schedule is always up-to-date and accurately reflected in Primavera P6.
4. Earned Value Management Systems
Earned Value Management is a particular technique which requires detailed reporting. You may have to use specific EVM tools like Deltek Cobra to meet contractual requirements as well, to ensure that your data can be audited or tracked.
An integration means you can populate both systems with relevant time, cost and project data to accurately calculate earned value for the work.
5. Work Order Management Systems
If you’ve got a lot of work orders or requests coming into a team, you might have work order management systems in place. There might be workflows requiring different levels of approval, and then requests might be allocated out to team members.
This is important for projects because it helps track resource availability – if your subject matter expert is busy on a work order, they aren’t available for project work. Equally, if a work order turns into a project, you can pass relevant information into your project tool to save time setting up a new initiative.
6. Time Management Systems
Timesheet data is important for project tracking, both for teams using earned value and also those billing clients for effort.
Even teams who don’t use timesheets for the financial data find it useful to monitor how long tasks take. Pass this information back to your P6 system to update project tasks, inform resource utilization and ensure the project stays on track by spotting early issues with delivery.
Timesheet information can feed into future project planning and inform estimates – but you have to capture it, store it and then make it available for other projects first.
7. In-house Systems
Finally, you may have systems built internally to deal with specific aspects of your business. Often, IT teams design simple (and sometimes complex) databases or tools in-house to meet a specific need. In fact, your in-house tools might fall into any of the above categories – we know of companies with in-house designed timesheet databases, for example.
There is huge value in identifying those bespoke systems and ensuring they talk to Primavera P6. That means you maintain data integrity and continue to have a ‘single version of the truth’ in your master data record.
There’s a lot to consider when you start to think about system integrations. You have to make sure data in all systems is recorded in the same way, that you’ve identified the ‘master’ data, data is mapped between systems so it ends up in the right place and that there are clear business rules for what gets exchanged and in what way.
That’s why many teams decide to bring in external resources to help with data integration involving Oracle Primavera P6 EPPM. It’s faster and often cheaper to bring in people who live and breathe system integrations and who have the functional knowledge to make sure the connections do what they need to do. Do you need any help to integrate with Primavera P6? We can help.