TEPCO - Understanding Time Periods in P6

hi thanks for joining me my name is Dan Stannis and I'm one of the p6 trainers and implementation specialists for TEPCO located in Baytown Texas and today we're going to talk about time periods in p6 when we add activities in p6 usually we enter the durations against those activities in days for those of you that work in downstream or upstream turnaround environments in the oil and gas industry typically those are scheduled in hours but most projects out there are scheduled in days as schedulers we need to have a clear understanding of what a day is is at eight hours a day 10 hours a day possibly nine it could be 24 it really depends on what your environment considers to be a day the first thing we need to clearly understand is under the admin menu and then admin preferences and there is a tab called time periods we need to have a clear understanding of what we have set up in p6 for these four time periods here specifically the hours per day currently the default setting is 8 hours per day for a week it's 40 for a month is 172 and for a year it's 2,000 there is this option here with a check box that says use assigned calendar to specify the number of work hours for each time period I'm gonna leave that turned off right now and I will come back to that later and explain what that is also because I'm gonna be showing you some examples I just want to be clear about the time period abbreviations down here and four minutes H 4 hours D 4 days and so on specifically days because I'm gonna show some examples where I put in the D after I enter in a number for the number of days so if I put in a 3 D inside my original duration field that means 3 days and you're gonna see how Primavera will convert that into hours automatically I also need to point out my user preferences so I'm going to go to edit user preferences and the reason I want to point this out is because I am gonna make some changes to this within this video currently I have my durations format set today and I have my duration label turned on I am going to turn on my decimals this will help clarify some things when we go and enter things in days and hours against an activity my units format cans daya's hours and i'm not going to turn the decimals on for that at this point for my first example here I have an activity put in with a duration of 5 days and I also have a resource assigned to it a single resource so the 5 days at 8 hours per day calculates as 40 total labor units I'm going to change my duration to one day and you'll see that the budget of the labored units are recalculates based on eight hours a day now I'm going to go to edit user preferences and I'm gonna change my duration format under the time units tab to hour now you can see that my duration has converted into hours one day equals eight hours per day and what I want to point out here is I'm going to type in 2d because p6 will take the abbreviation that we have set up in the admin preferences and it will automatically convert at hour so when I hit enter right now it will take the two days and convert it into hours because my user preferences are set to view in hours so by putting in 2d it calculates based on the admin settings for time periods of eight hours per day it calculates as sixteen hours the same concept applies if I enter the duration in as weeks so I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna enter 3w and watch how the hours calculate based on entering three weeks so now we have a hundred and twenty hours so again p6 took the three weeks and by using 40 hours a week in the admin preferences it converted it into a hundred and twenty hours now I'm going to show you what happens if we change the admin preferences for the time periods I'm back to my previous example where we had 16 hours or eight hours per day equals one day so this would it be the equivalent of two days and if I change my user preferences you will see that so let's go ahead and do that so this is reflecting two days I'm going to change my user preferences back to hour and now I'm going to go to the admin preferences and I'm going to change what the hours per day are I'm going to change that to ten and I'll go ahead and change the hours per week to fifty now watch what happens to the original duration nothing changes this is good this means that p6 is retaining what our original duration for the hours are even though we had changed the time periods in the admin preferences now I'm going to go to edit user preferences and I'm going to change my duration format back today now watch what happens to the original duration field it has actually reconverted to a different number because now a day equals 10 hours and our activity was set to 16 hours for duration based on our changes to the admin preferences time periods tab it has now reconverted that into being 1.6 days rather than being 2 days what's important to understand here is that p6 always stores durations in hours and then it uses the time periods that are set up under admin preferences to convert them into days or weeks or months based on what you set your user preferences durations format - if a p6 scheduler is entering durations in days they need to have a clear understanding that p6 is actually storing those durations in an hourly format behind the scenes and it's storing those durations based on in this situation anyway what the admin preferences time periods are what we as schedulers don't want to do is make an assumption that a day equals something like 8 hours for example if I come in here and change this original duration to 3 days and I'm assuming 8 hours a day the budgeted unit should really be 24 hours but because our admin preferences time periods are set up for 10 hours a day it has now calc 30 labor units now let's look at another option under admin preferences time periods so I'm gonna go to admin admin preferences back to time periods and I'm going to turn this option on to use a signed calendar to specify the number of work hours for each time period what this does is it tells p6 don't look at these admin preferences anymore it tells p6 to look at the time periods associated with a specific calendar I'm going to go create a new calendar and I will show you the time periods associated with that calendar so I'm going to go to Enterprise and calendars and I'm gonna go ahead and click Add and add a new one I will derive it from the standard five a work week and I'm gonna call this one a four ten calendar now I'm going to modify it and in the modify window I'm gonna keep this pretty simple but I am gonna click the work week button and I'm going to set it up to be Monday through Thursday ten hours a day that means Friday will be zero hours click OK but now there's this button called time periods we need to click on this and notice how by default the time periods hours per day is set to eight this is not correct for us because we want a 410 calendar so a day equals 10 hours now the hours per week would be correct because it's 40 hours per week and then hours per month or an hours per year could probably remain the same I'll click OK and ok for what I'm about to show you I'm going to go change my user preferences to show the duration by hours again you'll notice I have an eight-hour activity here duration of 8 hours and there's one resources sign so that would be a labor units and this one is currently set to this standard five-day workweek calendar that particular calendar it's time periods are set to eight hours per day now I'm going to change this calendar to the new 410 calendar that we created notice how the original duration is still 8 hours which is good we wouldn't want a simple calendar change to affect that but if I come up here to edit user preferences and I changed my duration format today again notice how my duration now is 0.8 of a day rather than one day and if I change this calendar back to the standard five day work week which has eight hours per day per time period notice how the original duration changes to calculate as one full day knowing this p6 schedulers need to have a clear understanding of what calendar they're using when they're entering durations on the activities given this is a standard five day work week calendar and its time periods are set up for eight hours per day I should know prior to entering the duration how my hours are going to calculate so if I enter three days of duration here I should have in the back of my head already an understanding that that particular calendar is gonna calculate it as eight hours per day so if I hit three here it should be eight hours per day and that equals 24 if I change this calendar to the 410 again you'll see the duration change because p6 has now taken the 24 hour duration that was stored behind the scenes and it has converted it based on the time period for the new calendar another thing to be aware of is if I go to edit user preferences and this is something that gets overlooked a lot I'm gonna turn my decimals off notice how it says two days there let's go back to one day and one times ten on the 410 calendar equals ten labor units now I'm going to make this change back to the standard five day work week notice how my original duration is still showing as one this is because I have turned my decimals off I actually don't know right now that it has changed the duration in the day format because I don't have my decimals showing so I'm going to go back to edit user preferences and I will turn my decimals back on and now you will see the change so when you're working in this environment it's probably a good idea to have your decimals turned on a lot of people don't like to turn them on because it uses up more space in the column if you don't have them turned on you might be overlooking something or you might be making a mistake that you're not aware of and you simply see that the duration is rounding up to one or two or five when he hind the scenes based on the hours that have been stored against those durations it may actually be in a fraction or a decimal for a final example I'm going to give you a bit more of an extreme view of two activities these two activities are both the same duration long when it comes to calendar days so they're about three months starting both on October 1st and each ending October 31st however activity a has a 7 by 24 calendar so the original duration is reading 20 194 activity B has a 410 calendar and the duration is reading 530 hours also during this example I'm going to be going to edit user preferences and I'm going to toggle my duration format through all of the different duration types so I'm going to do hours days weeks months and years so that you can see the difference between the two activities when I do change the duration format before I get started I want to reiterate that both of these activities have the same start date of October 1st and they have the same finish date of December 31st so they are both around 91 days long or you could consider them 13 weeks long 3 months long or about a third of a year long or 1/4 long to start off I'm gonna utilize the admin admin preferences time periods and I am not going to use the assign calendar to specify the number of work hours for each time period so this checkbox is going to be turned off and we will not be looking at the time periods for each of the specific calendars given that our hours per day are 8 hours per week or 40 hours per month our 172 and hours per year are 2,000 now I'm going to change my user preferences duration format to days notice how activity B is showing 66 days an activity a is showing 274 we had mentioned that for calendar days consecutive calendar days that these activities are about 91 days long so the 410 calendar at 40 hours a week or 4 days worth of work per week is calculating at 66 days however the 7 by 24 calendar could be misleading because it is not 274 days long now I'm going to go to edit user preferences and change to weeks the same concept applies here the activities are about 13 weeks long so the weekly format for the 410 calendar is correct however the 7 by 24 is indicating that the activity is 54 weeks long which would technically be more than a year so that is not accurate as well and I will follow through by going to show you the durations format of a month the 7 by 24 calendar is showing that it's 12 months long even though we know that it is only 3 months long the 410 calendar is calculating properly and let's just take a look at year you can see that the 7 by 24 is indicating that that's one year long and that the 410 calendar is indicating that it's point two seven of a year I've set my duration format in my user preferences back to our and now I'm going to utilize the calendar time periods so I'm going to go to admin admin preferences and I'm going to turn this checkbox on which as defined previously will cause p6 to ignore these four fields and now it were to the calendar time periods before I go through the different duration formats I want to show you what I've set up for the calendar time periods for each calendar so I'm gonna go to Enterprise calendars I'm gonna select the four 10 and hit the modify button and go to time periods you can see that I've set up 10 hours a day since it is a 4 10 calendar that's the equivalent of 40 hours a week 172 hours a month and 2,000 hours a year I'm gonna click OK now I'm going to show you the 7 by 24 which is going to be different and here's the time periods for that 24 hours per day 168 hours in a week 730 in a month which is about an average and/or 8760 per year since we've setup different time periods for each calendar each of these activities are going to be referencing different time periods when we do the conversion to days weeks months and years now I'm going to go back to edit user preferences and I'm going to step through each of the different duration formats again first we'll start with day the 7 by 24 calendar is reading 91 days which would be accurate for a 24-hour calendar because it is 91 consecutive days the 410 calendar is reading a 53 day duration because we are only working four days out of each week back to edit user preferences and we will show it by week now they're both reading very similar here at about 13 weeks they are off a little bit on the decimals but they are converting correctly the 7 by 24 calendar in general is 13 weeks long but it's at 24 hours a day whereas the 410 calendar in general is 13 weeks long as well but only at 40 hours per week or 10 hours per day and we'll go to month these are both reading very similar as well at about 3 months and if we go to edit user preferences and go to year you can see that they're both reading at about a quarter of a year this is a better way to display the durations if you're using multiple calendars you want to keep this in mind as each calendar should have different time periods associated with it this is very important if you are displaying duration in days weeks months or years and it is not converting correctly let's summarize some of the key points discussed during this session first p6 always stores a duration in hours so if you enter your duration in days or weeks it will convert those durations into hours behind the scenes based on the time periods that you have set up either under admin preferences or if you are using the calendar time periods it will do the conversion based on the calendar time periods the storing of the duration hours is static so the hours that are stored will not change if you go and change your time periods but the way the durations are displayed can change so if you are looking at it in days or weeks those things can then alter based on how you have made the change to the time periods the admin preferences for time periods defines the number of duration hours per day week month and year so if you are utilizing the admin preferences only and not using the calendar time periods you want to make sure you have a clear understanding of what numbers are entered into those admin preferences for time periods is your organization considering 8 hours to be day or is it 10 hours to be a day you need to have a clear understanding of what that is before you start entering durations in days because it's going to take that number and it's going to convert the day entry into hours behind the scenes when we're in the admin preferences if you decide to activate the option to use a signed calendar to specify the number of work hours for each time period the duration conversion comes from the calendar time periods now not the admin preferences so the admin preference numbers are overwritten the durations are derived from the calendars it's a good idea to show your duration decimals to make sure you're not making a mistake I showed you an example where you could enter one day of duration based on eight hours a day but then if you change your time periods or you change a calendar to say a four 10 calendar from a five eight calendar it can change what your duration format looks like when you're viewing it in a daily format rather than an hourly format and when utilizing time periods for calendars changing an activity calendar can change how the durations are converted which is basically what I just said so if you are entering a duration against an activity it's a good idea to know beforehand and probably set beforehand which calendar you're going to be using so if you are using a 410 you may want to make sure that a 410 calendar is assigned to the activity prior to entering the durations that way if you enter two days for the duration it's going to take on in ten hours per day over a two day period I hope you found this tepco session on p6 time periods useful if you would like more information on tepco services or on the tepco training programs please go to WWF go us

Channel: TEPCOSolutions

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Id: 5Nckt8zYBFU

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2015