Benefits of Using Aurora’s Intelligent Scheduling vs. Primavera P6 Resource Leveling

Introduction

Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management is a powerful, robust, and easy to use solution for globally prioritizing, planning, managing, and executing projects, programs, and portfolios. Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management is an integrated project portfolio management (PPM) solution comprising role-specific functionality to satisfy each team member’s needs, responsibilities and skills. It provides a solution for managing projects of any size, adapts to various levels of complexities within a project, and intelligently scales to meet the needs of various roles, functions, or skill levels in your organization and on your project team. 

Primavera P6 provides a resource leveling capability with graphical support to assist users in understanding resource usage and helping them optimize resource utilization by hand. The goal of resource leveling in Primavera P6 is to provide the user with a valid resource loaded schedule that does not have any over allocated resources. Primavera P6 does not try to optimize the allocation of resources in order to generate the shortest resource leveled schedule. Even though Primavera does not purport to provide an optimized schedule, it is likely that many users of Primavera P6 are NOT aware that the results from the resource leveling process are not optimal and could be improved upon significantly. 

For context:

• resource leveling will refer to the functionality provided in Primavera P6 and other commercial project management software, and
• intelligent scheduling technology will refer to resource-constrained scheduling that attempts to optimize the utilization of resources to minimize the project duration.

For projects that are time critical/resource intensive, intelligent scheduling technology can significantly shorten project duration. Aurora is an intelligent advanced scheduling engine that can be utilized alongside Primavera P6, or used independently, to generate shorter schedules. The following will illustrate these benefits via the analysis of a real refinery turnaround project.

Refinery Turnaround Leveraging Intelligent Scheduling Technology

In order to compare, DRMcNatty and Stottler Henke worked in conjunction to analyze a real-world oil refinery turnaround project via

• Using Primavera P6 only (utilizing its resource leveling capability), and 
• Using Aurora’s intelligent scheduling technology.

The project network consists of over 2,500 activities. A view of the network is shown on this page. The results of the analyses are as follows:

• Primavera P6 resource leveling: 67 days, 3 hours
• Aurora Intelligent Scheduling: 56 days, 6 hours, 30 minutes

The difference in absolute terms is over 10.5 days. 

There are a few ways to compare these results; the simplest is to compare overall durations using the Aurora Intelligent Scheduling results as the basis: 

• Primavera P6 resource leveling is 19.3% longer than Aurora. 

Using the P6 resource leveling as the basis: 

• Aurora Intelligent Scheduling is 16.2% shorter than Primavera P6 resource leveling. 

Another valuable comparison can be made by considering the resource-constrained result with the Critical Path (the situation assuming unlimited resources). Why is this perspective valuable? Because the Critical Path is the “best case-” scenario, and the valid schedule when considering resources must always be longer than the Critical Path, so any duration longer than the Critical Path is the only portion of the total project duration that the resource leveling or intelligent scheduling can affect.

The Critical Path for the example refinery turnaround project is 46 days. Primavera P6 resource leveling results were 21.125 days longer than Critical Path and 45.9% longer. Primavera P6 leveraging Aurora Advanced Scheduling results were 10.27 days longer than Critical Path and 22% longer. The percent difference between days more than Critical Path for resource leveling and intelligent scheduling is 105.70%.

Execution & Other Benefits

All the results demonstrate the significant benefit of leveraging Aurora Intelligent Scheduling. Recall that everything besides the method for scheduling is the same in both cases. Leveraging Aurora saved over 10.5 days, and it also saved all of the associated costs with the resources that are needed, as well as the lost revenue from the refinery being unavailable. Of course, the cost savings and other benefits of leveraging Aurora are huge for the initial plan, but even more potential benefit comes in the execution phase of the project, where unexpected circumstances need to be dealt with. By leveraging Aurora, the updated schedule will be shorter than one created using only Primavera P6 resource-leveling. Therefore, every time an execution phase update is performed, the overall benefit of leveraging Aurora increases!