Category: powerquery

Create a PowerBI Resource Analysis Dashboard – by Darrin Kinney

Feel free to provide comments directly to my LinkedIn Post that references this article and contact me directly – Darrin Kinney

Some content in this post is perhaps superseded by PowerBI Progress & Schedule Dashboard.

Getting the right structure for what a PowerBI dashboard can do in relationship to construction projects is not a 1 sized fit all approach, so really this post is meant to just focus on some of the data elements, which again have been perhaps better presented in the new link above

Analyzing  resources in P6 is a common responsibility of all planners. However, ultimately the data typically stays in the realm of the planner, and never properly given to the specific project managers and project engineers who actually need to execute the work. Thus, there exist a huge opportunity in the digital world to extract data from P6, and present it to the masses. Planners are penultimate professionals in this. We live for this. We take the resource assignment data from P6 and work our magic in excel creating a suite of reports and graphs (s-curves).

However, all the excel work is customized. The ability to quickly drill into the data from the data table or the graph is just too difficult for management. The need to create custom graphs, takes time. Instead, we can create something quite amazing using PowerBI.

Using PowerBI we can create a simply easy to use dashboard that provide nearly unlimited flexibility to display both schedule and resource information to any user on a project. The below is a walk through to create a simple view with a simple schedule. However, I have run this through a schedule with 5,000 activities and multiple resources including both manhour resources and quantity resources. It is situations where you have data overload that PowerBI shines. Get the data out from the planner, and into the hands of the project management group.

Step 1 – Get resource assignment data

Using the resource assignment tab in P6, remove all the grouping and just display everything. You will want to ensure some key fields are available: Start Data, End Data, Resource Data, Resource ID and Type, Activity Name and ID, plus some WBS and grouping data (ex contract).

RA_2_P6_resources

Step 2 – Copy-Paste Resource Assignment Data into Excel

A simply copy-paste from P6 into excel will suffice. It is really that easy. Sometimes the data from P6 may not contain the right descriptions, so this is an opportunity to use some vlookups (or Index(Match()). The data also needs to be presented in a table. Select All and use CNTL-T to convert to a table.

RA_3_excel_table

Step 3 – Unpivot Data using Power Query

This step can be done directly inside PowerBI Desktop, or in perhaps a more flexible excel environment. I prefer to do as much data handling in excel to reduce the complications once inside PowerBI; however, many options exist.

Inside Excel (ensure you have power query add in), select the columns with the dates, and click “UnPinvot Columns”. Close and Exit.

After running the unpivot, you will see each data column turned into a row. This is an easier data format for use in databases and a trick universal not just for powerBI, but anytime you might be dealing with databases.

RA_5_powerq

Step 4 – Import Into PowerBI

PowerBI has very quick and easy import routines. This post is not meant to be a specific click by click guide. There are easy import routines you can find to import excel files. Again, as indicated above, just make sure your data is converted into a table. You can directly create a datasource using something similar to the below

=Excel.Workbook(File.Contents(“C:\Users\Name\Downloads\P6_resource_Assignments_HP.xlsx”), null, true)

Step 5 – Create your PowerBI Elements : Gantt, Graph, and Slicers

GANTT

The PowerBI file uses a custom visual you can download for free from the marketplace

GANTT by MAQ Software

The parameters you will want to use are roughly as noted below

GRAPH

The PowerBI file use AREA CHART. This is an easy to use built in graph feature of PowerBI. You can use potential extension of line graphs to show a % Complete curve. However, from a base usage, the area chart provides the easiest visual.

A nice trick in the overall dashboard is to align the data range of the GANTT with the GRAPH. I have found some limitations to this exist, but in this example, it worked quite nicely.

SLICER

The real power of this visual is through the use of slicers. Slicers allow for immediate filtering based on a variety of selections. This visuals uses a range of filters for Contract, Facility, SubFacility and ResourceID. Depending on the structure and data you extracted from the P6 resource assignment, your options here are unlimited.

Conclusion

This example just scratches the surface of what is possible. I found the above to be immediately useful to our project team in clearly visualizing the resources required over time. There is some manual effort to keep the source excel updated after changed to P6 – this is not a live linked datasource. There are numerous possible development extension people can use to customize this.

The biggest critique to the dashboard is the lack of visibility into the Baseline dates and plan curves. For this, we can only hope someone builds a more robust custom visual to accommodate this. In the end, happy planning.

RA_1_Final

Using Powerquery List.Dates to generate time phased Budget and account for holidays

There are plenty of templates on the internet on how to spread a budget using Excel formula, in this blog post we will use the Powerquery function “List.Dates”, and a calendar table to account for holidays and periods with less working hours, for example under extreme weather conditions, the working hours per day will be less than standard working hours.

Obviously Planning software handle this scenario very well, but contrary to popular belief, Excel is still the most widely used planning software among non-planners. (I have yet to see a cost controller or QS using a planning software, even MS Project).

The function is straightforward:

List.Dates(start as date, count as number, step as duration)

In this case, count will be the durations in days, and step will be 1 day

Let say you have a list of tasks, with a start and finish date, and some kind of budget, (cost, revenue, quantities, Effort required etc).

Budget_0

Let’s load the table Task and generate the spread.

  • First we calculate the duration ( Finish-Start)
  • We use the List.Dates to generate the list of dates between the start and finish of every task.
  • Expand the list to become a column.
  • Merge the list of date with the calendar table to get the working hours per day.
  • Now we sum the total working hours per id.
  • The % by day = working hours per day/ Total working hours per task.

Budget_1

Voila, you have % per day.  Now to spread the budget, just multiply the budget by % per day.

Then we load some dimensions table in order to slice and dice the pivot table and WE add a measure to calculate cumulative Budget time. As we are using a calendar table, we can show the budget per day, Month, year or any time period.

Here we got a nice little Star schema

Budget_2

 

 

 

Now a Pivot table with conditional formatting will show a Gantt like chart.

Budget_3

And a pivot chart to show the Budget per Period and the cumulative.

Budget_4

You can download the template here, you need Excel 2013+, if you don’t have it, you can always download PowerBI desktop for free, and import the Excel file, but you need to redo the charts though.

 

How to connect to Primavera SQLite database

if you have a standalone installation of Primavera using SQLite, and you want to see the data stored there, either for reporting or just by curiosity to study the schema, it is pretty easy to do that using Powerquery.

unfortunately there is no native connectors to SQLite but you can use ODBC, please fellow this tutorial how to download and install the drivers ( sorry you need admin right, that’s why you should be always nice with the IT).

we don’t use standalone installation at work, I just download one installation from Oracle site in my home computer, the installation is valid for 1 month, once it is installed i copied the SQLite file generated by Primavera with all the template Projects.

the connection string is like this

Source = Odbc.DataSource(“driver={SQLite3 ODBC Driver};database=C:\sqlite\PPMDBSQLite.db;longnames=0;timeout=1000;notxn=0;dsn=SQLite Datasource”, [HierarchicalNavigation=true])

use the same password and username used for installation

don’t query directly the file, but use a copy, there is a risk that you corrupt your file.

Capture

keep in mind the tables in Primavera are highly normalized, and the spread data are not stored ( for example forecast labor units per day/task), so depending on your reporting requirements it can be a non trivial task.

anyway My PowerBI template now use either xer or sqlite to generate reports.

Using PowerQuery to read Primavera Xer file

You can download the file here  or view the reports online

The last time I tried parsing an Xer file, I was using VBA and it was a horrible experience, anyway that was three years ago, The problem was not VBA per se, but supporting the different combination of Excel and Windows, I still receive sometimes emails from users complaining that Xer reader do not work for them, after a while I concluded it is not worth the effort.

Yesterday for no reason, I got this idea why not trying Powerquery , in 10 minutes I had a working prototype without writing a single line of code!!!  even better it reads in bulk, copy a bunch of xer in the same folders, and there are loaded, only conditions they needs to have the same revisions( don’t mix P6 rev 7 with rev 8), as different revisions of P6 introduce some minor changes in the Xer schema, ( they add or remove some columns)

It is only a proof of concepts, I only loaded some tables, (activities and activities code), the data is loaded in the Data Model, and you need at least Excel 2013 with the free PowerQuery Installed.

1

Make sure you write the path to where your Xer is stored

2

You need to refresh the Queries here

6-6

Here is a pivot with some measures, now you can group only by Project and Activity codes and obviously by activity id.

6-3

I test it with two Xer that contains 47 projects