How CxLens ingests and rebuilds your Oracle P6 schedule
An XER file is the export format Oracle Primavera P6 uses to move a schedule between systems. CxLens has no live link into P6. You export the schedule and upload it, and CxLens parses it and rebuilds the schedule inside the platform.
What CxLens reads from an XER file
CxLens extracts the parts of the export that commissioning work depends on.
Activities and dates
Activity IDs and names with their early start and early finish dates, so every task in the schedule is available to link against.
Baseline versus current
A comparison of the baseline schedule and the current one, so you can see how far the plan has moved.
WBS hierarchy
The work breakdown structure, so the project keeps its structure and you can find activities by name or WBS code.
Resource assignments
Included when they are present in the export.
Exporting from P6 and uploading
Export your project schedule from P6 as an .xer file, then upload it to your CxLens project. Because an XER export can contain more than one project, you choose which project to bring in at upload. You also enter the issued date of the revision and mark the file for schedule health analysis, planning connections, or both.
Processing starts when you click Process on the uploaded file, and you get an email when it finishes.
Working with P6 activities
With the schedule ingested, you link commissioning checklists to P6 activities, searching by activity name or WBS code and connecting several checklists at once. On large projects we can automate the first pass during implementation using activity ID patterns or WBS matching rules.
If your team has a repeatable planning pattern, Managed Scripts can pull planning dates directly from a linked P6 activity, so nobody re-enters schedule data by hand. Raise it in your discovery call and we will assess whether it fits.
P6 questions
- Which versions of P6 can I export from?
- CxLens accepts .xer exports from both P6 Professional and P6 EPPM.
- My XER file contains more than one project. What happens?
- P6 exports can hold several projects at once. When you upload the file, you select the one project you want CxLens to import.
- Does CxLens read the baseline from P6?
- Yes. CxLens extracts the baseline and current schedules so it can compare them, and each later revision you upload is compared with the one before.
After the upload
What happens next is the same for every schedule: the health check, the history of revisions, and the comparison that flags what moved. It is covered in how schedule import works. The linking itself is the schedule connection feature, and your checklists arrive from CxAlloy. If your schedule is in Microsoft Project instead, see MS Project schedule import.
Talk to us about your project
We'll go through your commissioning challenges and tell you whether CxLens can help.
Or email us directly: hello@cxlens.io