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Steve Cotterell looks at a useful toolkit that lets you view and analyse Primavera and Microsoft Project files in an Excel workbook.

An Excel-based toolkit that allows you to view and analyse Primavera XER and Microsoft MPP data files in a familiar workbook format.

Primavera P6 stores the data it uses in more than 170 linked tables made up of records, with information held in a variety of fields. The twenty most commonly used tables contain data such as details of tasks, resources, materials and timelines. This information is all stored in a file with an XER suffix, which can also be regarded as a dump of all the project information held by Primavera P6.

One of XER’s founders began his project management career working with Artemis in a variety of companies. Eventually, he found himself working at Sellafield and using Primavera. There, he managed the system and developed tools to integrate the Primavera data with other systems used and, whilst there, he developed a program called PC Toolbox that took its information from Primavera output reports. This gave him the idea of directly accessing XER files for the required information. With this in mind, three years ago, he founded a company (XER Ltd) and developed a new product called XER Pro which can read and analyse both Primavera XER and Microsoft MPP files.

Today, XER Ltd. is owned by The Spencer Group, a company with five hundred employees (including sixteen software developers) and a £100 - £150 million a year turnover, based in Hull. They use the XER Schedule Toolkit within their own company and, until fairly recently, although they offered it for sale via the Web, they made only limited efforts to market it, their main sales platform being word-of-mouth. Nonetheless, more than 20,000 companies currently use this toolkit in more than 150 countries. Sixty percent of their sales have been in the

US and Canada but they also have had significant sales in Australia and South Africa. They have recently reached an agreement with Milestone Ltd. who will be marketing the XER Schedule Toolkit in the UK.

In many organisations, many managers and non-planning personnel never get to see a project schedule. However, the XER Schedule Toolkit lets these people see the schedule and have access to the data it contains, letting them slice and dice the data to their hearts’ content. There are tools within the kit to calculate earned value, schedule quality and a variety of other metrics.

It is a stand-alone product that runs on a single PC. It’s built using the Microsoft .NET framework and works within a Microsoft Excel window, presenting a familiar appearance to users. All the XER Schedule Toolkit’s outputs are in Excel format. A range of free tutorial videos, showing you how to use the various features, is available on the website (see below) and accessible by everyone.

On opening the product for the first time, you see an opening menu which was assembled after watching how people coped with using the product for the first time. The five options offered are: Get Started; Toolkit Options; About; Help and My Account.

Click “Get Started” and you are presented with a “Project Source Selection” dialogue box giving you the choice of where you want to import data from and offering the use of a sample data file for new users to play with.

You select a file and the system reads it and tells you what projects it contains. You can import one, several or

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The schedule viewed in the XER Schedule Toolkit’s Gantt chart

all of these projects. You can also, having imported one set of data, import a project from another Primavera or Microsoft Project file. You are then given the option of adding a baseline to the imported file.

Some users regularly import files of 10,000 plus activities without problems; however, there is a limit to the number of activities the system can handle. In one recorded instance, it wouldn’t work with a 70,000-activity file.

Your project data is now in the system and hereafter you see an expanded menu offering the full range of functionality. Also shown on the menu are a dozen shortcuts to the most commonly used reporting options. At present, users are not able to add their own shortcuts to this menu and there are no other tailoring options available here - but it is planned to change this in a future version.

At this stage, a new dialogue box opens offering two alternative options. Option one lets you “Manage Projects in Database” and enables you to import additional project data from other sources. You can also delete an individual project or all of them.

The second option gives you the ability to “Filter, Organise, Select Project Data”. The XER Schedule Toolkit, by default, structures imported data into its original work breakdown structure format, but you can group and organise the data by other parameters - for example, by department. There are also activity and resource filters. You could filter activities by their activity code, date or any other included parameter - even by a certain word in the activity description. You could filter resources, for example, by name or by group. You can combine different filters to achieve a more targeted selection.

Having completed the filtering operation, a tree of the

relevant part of the work breakdown structure is displayed and, if you select one or more of the listed headings, you are shown a total activity count for the selected items and you can then view and analyse this selection. At this stage, you can give the view containing your filtered data selection a name for future use. The set of named views that you have saved appears in a drop-down menu on your screen.

Click the “View Schedule” button and the Gantt chart is displayed. This facility enables people who don’t have the Primavera or Microsoft scheduling software to view the schedules using the XER Schedule Toolkit. For ease of viewing, you can switch the display to full screen at this point. The data displayed is colour-coded so that critical activities are coloured red and so on.

In the spreadsheet area of the Gantt chart, the XER Schedule Toolkit comes with a set of preconfigured column formats. However, you also have the option of tailoring the column display to include your choice of data, including some that are not available within Primavera, such as expenses, resource data, driving predecessors and successors. You can also display some schedule quality information (such as the fact that an activity has no predecessor or successor). If you right click on a column heading, you can filter on the column, setting your own conditions. You can save your own column layout for future use.

On the bar side of the Gantt, the timescales can be changed and you can drag the timescale displayed at the head of the chart to expand or shrink your viewing area. You can enlarge up to 1000% and, on the right click menu, “Return to Autofit” puts the screen back to its original state. You can also filter the selected data based on either a specific date range of from, for example,

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“today to four weeks hence” or “project start to plus six weeks” and so on. Right click on any activity and you are given the option to remove filters and return to your original view. Other items on the right click menu let you expand and collapse the work breakdown structure and show the task details to let you see the full information about the activity.

You can turn float bars and baseline bars on and off. You can change the chart colours and you have a selection of other formatting options. You can choose whether to display relationship lines and. if you hover your cursor over a relationship line, you are shown details of the predecessor, successor, type of link, lag, etc.

The “Schedule View” button gives you a selection of standard sets of filters such as critical path activities and milestones that you can apply by ticking checkboxes.

Once you have the view organised to your requirement, a click on the “Export to Excel” button sends all data in the display to a functional Excel workbook, which can now be worked on without the need for the XER Schedule Toolkit to be on the machine, allowing the information to be shared with anyone who has Excel.

The workbook includes many formatting features and contains its own set of functionality that enables many of the operations possible within the XER Schedule Toolkit to be carried out in Excel, but only on the filtered data set as exported by the XER Schedule Toolkit. No additional data is included.

Returning to the XER Schedule Toolkit, the Main Menu “Schedule Quality” button gives you the ability to carry out 21 different checks on the schedule’s structural integrity, including all fourteen of the DCMA (Defense

Contract Management Agency) checks, including checks for looped logic and the lack of a predecessor and/or successor. You can run this option on any selected dataset and save the view in the drop-down menu for future use.

The checks having been run, the results are displayed on a screen containing a set of thumbnail RAG colour coded symbols. Clicking on any of these symbols, you can drill into the data behind them to see the details of any task that has failed the check. Out-of-the-box, the system comes with its own preset set of thresholds that control the levels at which the RAG symbols change colour, but you can tailor these thresholds to your own requirements and, for many of the checks, you can tailor exactly what is examined under each heading.

Having done the checks, you can export the list of failed tasks to Excel and, using this list, go to Primavera or Project and make the necessary corrections and adjustments to the schedule.

The Earned Value button gives you options to report on costs or units (hours etc.). The Project Allowance Table produces a list of resources in the schedule (both human and nonhuman). When you come to choose what resources are to be included in your selection, you are offered a list of the resources found in the schedule for you to choose from. You can select all resources, individual resources or you can create groups of resources. Probably you’d use this facility to sort the resources into human and non-human and then to further categorise them. The list then produced will name the resources and total the requirements for each.

You can produce a filtered list of resources so that you can see how much of a specific resource is required for

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a task and view the spread, over the duration of the task, of the requirement for this resource. This information would probably be useful for procurement purposes.

Summary reports for costs and for resources can be produced and drilled into for greater detail.

The Dashboard lets you see a selection of system reports across projects or across periods of time. The XER Schedule Toolkit contains a set of template reports and you can also create your own templates which you can share with other users.

When configuring your dashboard, you are given a range of chart types that you can include and, by ticking check boxes, you select the reports and the data that you want to be displayed. You can move the charts around the screen and re-size them. Right click on a chart and you are given options to change how the chart looks. You name the dashboard and save the template file.

A completed dashboard can be exported to Excel where it will appear similar, with maybe a little visual adjustment required. The data behind the dashboard is there in the Excel file and can be drilled into for detailed examination.

A fifteen-day free trial version is available from the XER Schedule Toolkit Web site: www.xertoolkit.com

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Contact DetailsMilestone Ltd.Great West House, Great West RoadBrentford, London TW8 9DF

Tel: 0208 3265760

Email: info@milestoneuk.com

Right to ReplyThanks Steve, for taking time out to visit our Hull offices and review the XER Schedule Toolkit.

We are extremely proud of the XER Schedule Toolkit and the real-world benefits it has introduced here at The Spencer Group.

Unfortunately, many people in the industry still recognise the XER Schedule Toolkit as specialist software used only by planning engineers to improve schedule quality as that was the scope of the earliest incarnation. Hopefully, through this article we can begin to introduce the versatile nature of the modern-day product’s functionality which is helping us to improve schedule awareness and project delivery at every stage.I would encourage your readers to take advantage of the free trial we offer on our website (www.xertoolkit.com).

Nick HalksworthFounder and Developer

XER Limited

A Dashboard

How much does it cost?

To purchase the XER Schedule Toolkit costs

£745 and this price includes the first year’s

support, maintenance and updates. Thereafter, if

required, support, maintenance and updates cost

£149 per annum.www.milestoneuk.com

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