P6 Visionary
Customer: Network Rail
Network Rail North West & Central (NW&C) is the ‘Backbone of Britain’, employing 8000 people, and home to the West Coast Mainline, the busiest mixed-use railway in Europe, serving London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Works Delivery is a multidiscipline deliver of work on and off track throughout the region, with a portfolio of over 1000 projects being managed at any one time.
The challenge
The Works Delivery Team use Oracle Primavera P6 to coordinate scheduling and project management across the portfolio. Whilst this provides a very powerful environment for the planners within the team, it isn’t available for wider stakeholders to access, reducing the utility of the data and putting additional strain on a limited number of P6 proficient resources to respond to ad hoc queries.
The Solution
The Works Delivery Team wanted to create a modern, highly visual, web-based application that federates all of the activity and milestone data in their P6 database and makes it available to anyone who required access on any device.
Asset Insights worked in an agile way with the Works Delivery Team, facilitating a series of discovery workshops to capture requirements from different disciplines before translating these into a sophisticated, cloud hosted web application, that ensures users can visualise the whole portfolio at a glance but are only ever a couple of clicks away from the detail of a ‘project on a page’.
Based on open-source technologies within Azure Cloud, the P6 Visionary Tool routinely exports and analyses over 0.25M activity and milestone records across 1000+ projects, delivering great performance with minimal latency, whilst automating queries that can’t be replicated in standard BI Tools. The application leverages a number of microservices from Asset Insights Engineering Digital Acceleration Platform EDAPt, including portfolio dashboard, schedule, mapping and dynamic search components. EDAPt enables Critical Infrastructure owners to digitally transform and modernise legacy systems in a flexible and affordable manner at pace.
The Benefits
The Portal has introduced a number of benefits to the MSF Team including:
Improved visibility of the right data highlights the risks and opportunities across the portfolio, improving decision making capabilities and productivity.
Better access to data from any location on any device improves the timeliness of interventions.
Improved process adherence - By surfacing the P6 data in this way, data quality issues and performance on ‘mandatory’ activities is exposed.
Enhanced collaboration between planners and wider stakeholders and across disciplines.