Primavera Contractor does not allow you to do resource leveling, just resource loading. It is also limited to fewer than 1000 activities. It was intended for subcontractors submitting their schedule portion to the General Contractor for merging this with the overall schedule, perhaps should have been called Subcontractor.

I believe the idea was abandoned by ORACLE as it was too limited.

In my opinion all versions of PowerProject as well as all versions of Spider Project are better fit to the Construction industry than any ORACLE/Primavera product.

If you wonder why so much trouble with the installation just look at the origins of P6 it was developed by another company with a targeted IT audience proficient with the intricacies of database administration and the windows registry, not for Construction people. That Primavera eventually created a mutation called P3ec "P3e for construction" was another marketing strategy latter abandoned. I believe not counting on who the user is makes P6 database implementation a bad design choice.

Hi Louise

Welcome to Planning Planet

Good luck with your switch over - I think you will find that Primavera products are not so intuitive to use as PowerProject.

Just look at the number of queries that arise on the P6 thread.

I cannot speak from personal experience because i have bought the P6 software but have not been able to install it.

If you are going to buy P6 then try the "contractor" version first (if they still do it that is).

It is similar in status to the Powerproject standalone version as against enterprise and is considerably cheaper.

Best regards

Mike Testro

Louise,

I did not discover significant difference between P3e and P6, suppose between P5 and P6 it is just about the correction of a few thousand bugs, this you can find on updates literature.

For years, we used SureTrak but found it very limited with regard to resource loading. In addition, it is incompatible with Windows 7 unless you have professional version and use virtual desktop software that becomes intrusive. I believe it is so obsolete that not even ORACLE provides support for it and there are no plans to upgrade it. It also goes with P3, too expensive for obsolete software no longer supported by ORACLE.

About P6 we tried it and found it as bad as the original P3e called similar to P3 as to attract loyal P3 users into this software. I opted for Spider Project after many years of frustration with P3e we used exclusively to draw bar charts from schedules generated by SureTrak and P3. We had no other option to use SureTrak and P3 for evaluation of the submitted schedules. It took me a whole year to identify a good and updated substitute and to my surprise, I ended up very satisfied with the choice.

Open up your mind if you still have the option for a free choice otherwise surrender to the whims of others. Suggest you explore Spider Project or even Aurora. Aurora for the case you need to use P6 but P6 engine is not good enough. I found Spider was capable of producing better results than Aurora sample job on their site. Still if you accept this limitation, Aurora cannot compensate for other resource loading functionalities not available in P6, substandard improvement but better than P6 alone. And their site has very nice Boeing and NASA photos you can use to attract clients.

Of course with activity splitting even MS Project got better results than Aurora and P6.

http://www.stottlerhenke.com/news/pr_aurora_boeing.htm

http://www.stottlerhenke.com/products/aurora/Turnaround/2009-10-01_Auror...

I do not recommend anyone critical chain and use of buffers as it fool the schedule in a similar way date constraints do. Some Early Dates are delayed by buffers making the schedule unreliable for management action. In addition, I understand critical chain use of buffers affects resource allocation in the wrong way as it distorts true available float, a metric used by resource allocation algorithms.

Best Regards,
Rafael