Primavera (P6) is one of the leading project management applications, similar to MS-Project server edition, which allows companies to plan programs, WBS, tasks and resources for complex programs and sub-projects. It is more user-friendly as compared to SAP and does not result in many locally managed overlapping plans which is the achilles-heel of MS-Project.

While labor resource planning and cost estimating is easy to do in this application, it might be convenient at times for engineers or subject matter experts  who are building a schedule in Primavera P6 to develop resource estimates there at the same time. Or a high level resource estimate from this application might be broken into more detail in P6, in anticipation of contract award and detailed planning. There are basically two ways to do this:

1. Resources can be assigned to tasks in this application and exported to P6 for more detailed analysis/break-down, OR
2. Resources can be assigned to tasks in Primavera P6 and imported back to this application, in essence updating either:
   • Task dates only - all resource and effort estimates remain controlled solely by this application
   • Summary level resources - the resource details in Primavera, perhaps by named individual, are rolled up to a planning resource level and costed at a pre-determined hourly rate in this application
   • Detailed level resources - effort estimates in this application are replaced by the new data developed in Primavera.

This interface, together with the SAP Baseline Budget interface, is illustrated in the figure below.

Depending on which option is selected for import the following resources will be imported into the LABOR tab:

1. The first option to import tasks only does not import any resources from Primavera. Instead maintain resource labor estimates here manually or using parametric formula
2. The second option converts resources in P6 for named individuals into summary level or planned resource 'groups' in this application, summing up the hours for every individual in P6 planned on the same task with the same resource group code. A list of names associated with each resource group can be maintained in the labor group activity or uploaded from a spreadsheet as part of the data migration
3. The third option converts each resource in P6 into an equivalent resource in this application, provided that a P6 resource ID was maintained for each imported Primavera resource. Any imported P6 resources which are not defined in our application will result in errors during the import to indicate which records were skipped and not imported.