You are implementing Primavera P6 and have determined that the delivered reporting tools are not up to snuff.  Before you go out and buy a new report-writing tool, take a step back and look in your enterprise toolbox.  You might find you already have a tool that fits the bill.

At Iberdrola Renewables, we have a large contingent of data consumers who need read-only access to project information stored in Primavera.  P6 has proved to be a great and flexible tool for managing vast amounts of project metadata.   By configuring Project Codes, Project UDFs, and Project Layouts in P6, we have streamlined the process of managing project pipeline data and greatly enhanced data quality.  However, the licensing cost and training effort to get dozens of read-only users to access that information in P6 was disconcerting.  What was needed was a simple-to-use tool to provide a read-only view of the pipeline data to the casual user.

To a reporting tool, data is data.  Org Publisher (from Aquire) is designed and marketed to chart and display employee and human resource records via an intuitive browser interface.  At its core, the tool is architected to display hierarchically structured data from any ODBC data source.  As the Project Pipeline data stored in Primavera P6 is also structured hierarchically via the Enterprise Project Structure (EPS), this was a natural fit.

After creating a custom view that managed the necessary joins to pull a few dozen fields from half a dozen tables into a single row per project, the Primavera data was ready to be pulled into Org Publisher.  The Org Publisher tool provides multiple views of the data, including a graphical Chart View (displaying relationships between records), a Summary View (for Counts and Totaling), a Profile View (to view all data associated with a single document), and a List View (to view all data in spreadsheet layout including download to Excel capability).  Once created, the chart and views were scheduled to refresh nightly and were made available through a web browser on the Intranet.  Below is a sample:

Besides the apparent licensing cost savings associated with not purchasing another tool, there are other advantages to adapting and re-using existing technology.  End users will be thrilled not to be forced to learn another tool, easing adoption.  Additionally, the technical resources responsible for supporting the tool will be ready even before day one.