Have you experienced this Primavera P6 to Deltek Cobra Integration Warning?
[Warning]Finish date for budget resource ENG (04/25/2017) after finish date of activity 1.2.2.1.6.1 (11/01/2016)
Almost every time I attempt integration from Primavera P6 to Deltek Cobra, I see these warnings and thus my labor units and dollars come up short as a result.
The cause – “Duplicate activity IDs.”
I know, Primavera P6 isn’t supposed to allow duplicate activity IDs. Nevertheless, it can and does happen; particularly when there are multiple users working in the P6 Integrated Master Schedule (IMS). In every case where I’ve seen this warning, I’ve found duplicate activity IDs in P6.
How this causes the error is as follows: Take this example, duplicate activity ID A2050 appears in two different places in the P6 schedule and has different dates and descriptions. It is indeed two activities that are sharing an ID.
‘A2050 – Site Design’ starts 1/1/2016 and finishes 3/5/2016 and has ENG assigned as the resource.
‘A2050 – Plot Establishment’ starts 7/15/2016 and finishes 8/30/2016 and has TECH assigned as a resource.
However, Deltek Cobra is not looking at the activity description; it’s going entirely on the activity ID. Thus it reads A2050, and finds two resources, one of which has assignment dates that are way outside of the first Jan – Mar dates of the activity.
The warning for this particular scenario would read as follows in the integration log.
[Warning] Start/finish dates for budget resource TECH (07/15/2016,08/30/2016) outside of start/finish dates for activity A2050 (01/01/2016,03/05/2016)
To find duplicate Activity IDs in Primavera P6, create a simple report using the P6 Report view’s Report Wizard that dumps all the Activity IDs and Names into a CSV file.
You can then open this in Microsoft Excel and use the Conditional Formatting | Highlight Cell Rules | Duplicate Values option in the Home ribbon to locate the duplicate activity IDs in the list.
The next step is to go back into Primavera P6 and manually change the duplicate values. Once you are certain you have removed all duplicate activity IDs, you can redo your integration. You will find that this warning is no longer appearing in the Integration log.