an "outside the box" approach to building a project schedule saves time, reduces errors
While working for Centerline Engineering, I was assigned to work with one of Centerline's project managers on site at an oil refinery in Canton, Ohio. The project involved a 3-week maintenance shutdown of an Alkylation Unit. My job was to create the project schedule based on input from the project manager (in Primavera's Finest Hour, the predecessor to P3) then update it as the work progressed.
Our effort was slow at first. Neither of us had experience with oil refineries. We interviewed several boiler-makers and pipe-fitters, and relied heavily on their prior experience working on Alkylation Units. We soon discovered that repairs to pressure vessels in the unit would take the bulk of the time.
More than a dozen vessels were involved, and each required nearly two dozen tasks to be performed on them. To complicate matters, from a scheduling perspective, the tasks were linked in a chain of dependent events and each task required the assignment of several resources. Each task also required the assignment of several project codes for reporting purposes. All of this implied several days of data entry time.
We were already working 12-14 hours a day and couldn't afford extra days to spend on data entry. We needed a shortcut. Fortunately, Finest Hour had one. The software provided a "batch" capability that could be used to extract data from the schedule as data records in a text file. The records could be edited and imported back into the schedule as an update. Batch was the answer.
The project manager and I devised a generic, "template" of tasks that a vessel required. In addition to tasks, the template also contained dependency, resource, and code information. Once all data related to the generic vessel was input, I batched out all of the applicable records, loaded them into Finest Hour's text editor, and duplicated them as many times as there were vessels. Since each vessel had its own numeric series, Search & Replace operations made it easy to renumber the records appropriately for each vessel.
When finished, I batched all of the new records into the schedule. Some manual tweaking remained, but it was minor. Using the batch capability of the software, a text editor, and a little ingenuity, I did in a single day what would have otherwise taken several days.
By the way, the project completed 3 days ahead of schedule. It was the quickest, most trouble-free maintenance effort, of its magnitude, ever performed on an Alkylation Unit at that refinery.