How To Remove Resource Costs from XERs in Primavera P6

This tutorial will walk you through a process to remove resource costs from XERs exported from Primavera P6.  This comes in very handy if you are sending project schedules to general contractors but want to hide cost information from them (or anyone else for that matter).

In case you want to completely remove resources from your schedule prior to sending over the XER file, here are the steps to do that.

Tutorial Files

Complete this tutorial by downloading the following files:

Transcript

Good morning! Hey, welcome back to the Planner tutorial’s hub. It’s Michael. Hope you’re having a great day so far.

I had an interesting email request come into my inbox the other day. This gentleman works as a sub-contracting company and needs to send an XER file to the general contractor. That’s a standard kind of situation.

Inside that XER file, he needs to include resourcing. He needs to include his resourcing in labor hours but the general contractor isn’t concerned and doesn’t want to see any information about cost. He wants to include resources but he doesn’t care about the cost.

Now, the problem he has is that back in his resource dictionary, he wants to have the cost in his copy of the project but not have the cost in the copy that goes to the XER file or that goes to the general contractor. The other thing is, he wants to keep the rates private. He uses some of these resources on other projects and those rates are standard rates for him as a sub-contracting company. He wants to preserve those rates as private.

Now, the problem we have with Primavera is that if I attach a resource, assign a resource to activities and I export that project plan, that resource and all its global information gets inserted into the XER file, which means that any rates gets set up in the destination database as well. He asked me how can I send them the XER file but hide that rate information so that I can keep that information private.
Well, it’s an interesting problem and I’ve got an interesting solution. Let’s go ahead and get started. Let’s see what happens.

What I’ve got opened here is Microsoft Excel and a copy of the XER File Parser Builder spreadsheet. We’ve done a few tutorials around this File Parser Builder spreadsheet. You should go and check them out.

Essentially, what it does is it allows you to edit the contents of an XER file and then rebuild that XER file. You can do it all independently of Primavera. Because once in a while we get some IT people come and look at the website. I thought we do an IT project today so I’ve got this call center project that I’m going to go ahead and open up. Essentially, all it did was on the general tab of this spreadsheet there’s an open load XER file button. I’ve gone ahead and loaded it in my XER file. Here it is, call center copy.

Okay, great. Now, remember, what I want to do is I want to hide the rate information. I want to build an XER file that has no rates essentially it’s what I want to do. That rate information is in the XER file. Now, you can see the XER File Parser builds all these different tables and they’re all related to different aspects and ways that the data is set up in Primavera. We’re going to go down here to the resource. I’m going to scroll down a little bit more.

Here we go, resource rate table so, I’ll click there. That’s essentially going to bring me to this resource rate tab. This is really easy. What we’re going to do essentially is we’re going to zero all of the resource rates. I’m just going to cut, put in some zeroes here. Cost per quantity that’s essentially the hourly rate and I’m basically going to copy and paste all that in here. Pretty simple. That zeroes out the rates.

We go back to my general tab here. Now, I’m going to rebuild the XER file. Go ahead and click build XER file. I’m going to go ahead and give this a name. One thing I suggest is not to overwrite an existing XER file but to give it a brand new name.

We’ll go ahead and put this on my desktop and I’ll this call center no rates. Okay, go ahead and save it then click okay. Process complete. I now have a new XER file that has no rate information on it. Pretty cool.

I have a little addendum in that I want to make sure our work is a 100% complete. I think there might be something else you need to check. In fact, I’m sure there’s something else you need to check.

Get back here. If you go to the bottom one, which is Task Resources it is basically your assignments tab where you assign resources. You scroll over a little bit. I want you to look for this one, cost per quantity. Now, for the most part, that information you’ll see a whole bunch of— these lines don’t have it and then it’s all zeros. This is an anomaly for me. The last one actually has a cost per quantity. If it’s not zero I suggest you set this cost per quantity field to zero as well. Then you can go ahead and build your XER file.

You can see the process full circle. We’re back into Primavera. We’re going to import our newly created XER file. I’ll go ahead and do the import and let’s just put it here on the transportation, seems like a nice place.

Okay, there it is. Let’s go ahead. It’s already open, let’s go ahead and have a look. On the assignments, resource assignments tab, which as you see now is that all of my costs are set to zero. However, my budgeted units have been preserved. Budgeted units and actual units have been preserved.

Again you can go through it. You can see here’s the price per unit essentially that we set to zero. And so essentially it removes all of the cost information from the project plan but it keeps the resource and the labor unit’s information in there.

Over here on the resources tab, I’ll just put my filter on, the current project’s resources, again we can have a look at each of these resources and notice that all of the hourly rates are set to zero.

This is a pretty, handy tool, some handy skills to know especially if you’re in the business of sending XER files back and forth. I recommend and go ahead, download the XER file Parser from our site. Go and play with it and do your successful projects. Thanks.

Michael is an avid project controls blogger and is the Chief Learning Officer here at Plan Academy. Michael has taught 1000s professionals how to use project controls software like Primavera P6 over the past 10 years through his online courses and tutorials. Michael is a member of AACE, the Guild of Project Controls and holds his PMP certification from PMI.