Scheduling cannot exist without a project calendar in Primavera P6. For example, in our demonstration project ‘Wellmont Substation’ (used below in this article), without a calendar how would our electricians know when to start work or break for lunch?
Displaying the calendar timescale in Primavera P6 EPPM is shown in three different time phases; hours of the day, days of the week, and days of the month/year. Calendars can be used to display national holidays, resource vacation days as well as other custom dates.
How to Create a Calendar in Primavera P6 EPPM
In the Enterprise Project Structure, we make sure all our projects are closed. We open up our ‘Wellmont Substation’ project and select the ‘Administration’ tab at the top of the screen as shown below in Figure 1.
Figure 1
From the ribbon below the ‘Administration’ tab we select ‘Enterprise Data’ and we open up ‘Projects’ to select ‘Project Calendars ’and click the ‘+Add’ button. In the pop-up dialog box, ‘Select Calendar to Copy’ we select ’Corporate- Standard Full Time’ and ‘Select’ our choice on the bottom right of the dialog box, shown below in Figure 2.
Figure 2
We move to the center of the screen where we name our calendar ‘4X10’ which represents a 10-hour working day for four days a week. We save our work as shown below in Figure 3.
Figure 3
From the top bar, we click on select ‘Standard Work Week ‘and view the hours for each day. By holding down on the base of the blue block for Monday we expand the area to 6 pm. Great now we have a 10-hour working day for Monday. Shown below in Figure 4.
Figure 4
We continue along the days of the week; Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday expanding the areas to 6 pm to represent 10-hour working days. We need to remove Friday, to incorporate our 4 days a week calendar so we click on the cross in the top right-hand corner of Friday and it is removed. We then save our work, as shown below in Figure 5.
Figure 5
Assigning a National Holiday
To assign a national holiday we click on ‘Calendar’ and we select February 18th which is President’s Day. We click on the number ‘18’ of February 18th as shown below in Figure 6.
Figure 6
We go to the top, left-click, and select non-work as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7
When we scroll through the months using the ‘MONTH’ icon at the top right -hand side of the screen and select February we can see that the 18th is a non-work day, as shown in Figure 8. We would use the same process assigning a day as a non-work day to reflect any vacation time taken by our resources.
Figure 8
We need to check that the time periods are correct for our calendar so we select summary to view them. Our ‘Hours/Day’ are 8 well that’s not right we need a 10-hour day. If we don’t correct it to 10 hours and our resource works a 10-hour day this will result in 1.25 days as every working day is currently recorded as 8 hours.
We change the Hours/Day to 10, as shown n Figure 9. The Hours/Week are correct at 40. The Hours/Month and Hours/Year are estimated values that we don’t have to concern ourselves with.
Figure 9
Next, we need to verify our time periods. We select the ‘Applications Settings’ in the ‘Administration’ ribbon and select ‘Time Periods’ and we can see that the ‘Hours/Day’ is correctly set at 10 and our ‘Hours/Week’ is set at 40 as shown below in Figure 10.
Figure 10
Assigning Our Calendar to a Project
We select the ‘Projects’ tab and expand ‘Enterprise, Engineering and Construction (E&C) and Electrical Projects 01 (ELPR01)’ to select ‘Welllmont Substation’. We left-click on the gear next to ‘Wellmont Substation’ and select ‘Set Project Preferences’. From the ‘Project Preferences of Wellmont Substation’ dialog box we select ‘Calendar’ and from the drop-down menu, we select our 4×10 Calendar, as shown in Figure 11.
Figure 11
When we select ‘OK’ our calendar is displayed in our ‘Wellmont Substation’ project, as shown in Figure 12.
Figure 12
Summary
When you have created a calendar in Primavera P6 which reflects the needs of your project, it is important to check the time periods before you assign it to your project. The hours a day and hours a week have to be the same as your calendar. If they differ then the recording of a working day/week will be inaccurate and it could look like your resources are all working overtime or not fulfilling a working day.
Care should be taken when recording non-work days for national holidays or vacations, checks should be made to ensure the correct date is being recorded as a non-work day.