The XENA Utility solves import problems and provides configuration control for the integration of multiple Primavera P6 XER files.

Do you run into problems while importing your subcontractor or partner data into the production P6 database?  Primavera P6 users commonly need to import projects for a variety of reasons including migrating data from an older P6 database or reviewing a project created in another department or company.  Our experience shows that the most common reason for importing projects is to update the status of current projects in a master schedule when the updates are performed by a company or subcontractor without access to the user’s Primavera database.  Primavera users and schedulers are usually required to repeat this project import every month or every reporting cycle.  Since the other company or subcontractor database is different, the potential exists to import large amounts of unwanted data and configuration codes into the production P6 database.

Most P6 users have encountered this difficulty with configuration control.  The results are highly unorganized “lookup dictionaries” for the resources, calendars, activity codes and notebook topics.  These issues perpetuate themselves throughout the project by causing confusion and loss of productivity for other users when assigning values from these dictionaries.  The end result is that users that import projects for status updates have found that they must spend several hours after each update cycle cleaning up the mess created from the imported project.  Other organizations have prohibited users from importing projects altogether forcing the user to implement significantly less efficient methods of updating projects, once again adding more hours to each update cycle.

The solution to these problems lies in having a more robust import process than the one currently provided in the Primavera P6 application.  An efficient import process for Primavera XER files needs to allow the user to view the incoming data and make simple data mapping decisions.  The current process in Primavera only allows the user to decide at the object level, i.e. resource or calendar, whether the current data should be replaced by the incoming data, updated or ignored and not at the activity level.

Xena has teamed with Mustang Technologies to create XENA which solves these import problems and provides configuration control.  The XENA XER Utility is a standalone application that gives the user the power to view and control the XER file before importing the data.  XENA creates a revised XER file so that project schedulers can import into P6 with confidence, reducing effort and cleaner data.  Templates are created which can be used every time a file is imported from a specific source so the initial set up is only performed once, saving many hours on repairing imported data.  The tool has been priced to be accessible to all Primavera users and every month it will save many hours of tedious work fixing your data. XENA can also be useful as a mapping tool when migrating data from other Primavera databases.  Cleaner, faster data imports create reports that are clean and accurate making this tool extremely valuable to users and ultimately, to management trying to evaluate the status of the projects.

Click here to try XENA XER or contact us for more information.

Click here for a PDF of the Data Sheet.