Apple’s futuristic new headquarters in Cupertino, CA just cleared another major hurdle. July 22nd marked the end of a 45-day public comment period on the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for the Apple Campus 2. The next step is to incorporate the public comments and responses into the Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) for submission to the City of Cupertino’s Planning Commission. The FEIR and the Planning Commission’s comments will then be forwarded to the City Council. While no further comments to the DEIR will be accepted, the public will still have a chance to make comments at upcoming meetings of the Planning Commission and City Council. The DEIR attracted 348 public comments. As noted on our parent website (www.constructionscience.com) the original bids were $2B over the $3B budget envisioned by Apple. Assuming the project scope is reduced to stay within budget the Apple Campus 2 will still be one of the largest private projects in state history.
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Apple’s Spaceship Campus Clears Another Major Hurdle
We are now an Oracle Gold Partner
We are pleased to announce that Primavera Scheduling’s parent company, Construction Science, is now an Oracle Gold Partner. To celebrate our upgraded partnership with Oracle we are now offering Primavera P6 software for $300 off the list price and 10% off all live online and in-person classroom Primavera P6 training programs with the purchase of software. But wait, there’s more! We are also offering volume discounts for the purchase of more than three Primavera P6 licenses. Please contact Bill Pepoon for details on these additional discounts.
P6 Training in 4 Countries in 4 Days
This week Primavera Scheduling trained clients in four countries in four days. We started with clients in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, and finally, Abu Dhabi. These were all live online Primavera P6 training sessions. We try very hard to accommodate clients anywhere in the world. More importantly, we are probably the only Primavera training firm that provides live training on demand. Need online P6 training right away? Call us! We do not make you wait a month or more for a class to be scheduled. If you do not see a class on our calendars that meets your needs please call us and we will make every effort to meet your schedule.
We will also throw down this challenge: call any other Primavera training firm on a weekend and see if they answer the phone! Not only do we answer the phone, we train on weekends.
While we are currently developing a video P6 training series we will always offer live online training as another option. Being able to ask the instructor questions or spend more time on one subject or another are clear advantages over videos. Of course, we have many in-person sessions as well. Please call us for more details – any day of the week!
The Missing Version of Primavera P6
Oracle appears to have killed off Release 7.0 of Primavera P6. The questions is, why? Those of you who have downloaded Primavera software from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud are probably aware of the existence of older Primavera programs that are no longer sold – P3 and SureTrak in particular. The purpose, as we understand, is to support licensed users who may need to reinstall these programs. Oracle grants a perpetual license for each program, so this makes sense. Yet Release 7.0 has recently been dropped from Oracle’s eDelivery site. Release 7.0 was the first version released after Oracle purchased Primavera. We have always liked this version because its user interface is a little simpler to learn and the program is less likely to crash than some of the newer releases.
Release 8.1 has been dropped as well, but this seems like much less of an issue. The differences between Releases 8.1 and 8.2 are so minor that most users would never notice them. But Release 7.0 is much different that the R8 series and it would seem likely that some users would want to continue using this older version. We know of one major construction company with over a $1B in annual revenue that has standardized on Release 7.0 so clearly it is not considered to be an inferior program. Oracle stopped using serial numbers with R7.0 so in theory the software could be copied from one computer to another, but whether this is considered legal is another matter.
Primavera Scheduling now recommends that users purchase Release 8.3 to avoid any licensing issues in the future. Our initial testing of R8.3 suggests that is more stable than R8.2 and besides, we do not have too many other choices! Either we purchase R8.2 or R8.3 or we buy something else. Primavera P6 is dominant scheduling program in the United States so there is really no incentive to switch. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding which version of Primavera to purchase.
Hitting the Cycle in Primavera P6 Training
I have been on vacation the past week but there is no so thing as a true vacation when you own your own business. I delivered two online P6 training sessions while “on vacation” and worked on a construction claim as well. I like to stay busy. Best of all, our firm managed to “hit the cycle” in P6 training reservations. By that I mean we booked clients for our 4-hour, 8-hour, 16-hour and 24-hour P6 training programs. And this does not include private P6 training sessions we will be delivering in Tulsa, OK and Rogers, AR.
One person called us for P6 training because another training firm had cancelled their class in San Francisco at the last minute. He was flying in from Seattle so obviously that was not a good situation. While we could not offer training on the same dates we managed to schedule him for our 3-day class at the end of this month. This is actually not too unusual for us. A new client comes to us because someone else could not deliver the training they needed.
Every month we schedule quite a few P6 classes online and in-person in our offices near Sacramento. Part of our philosophy is that you create demand for something by making it readily available. In an era when someone can buy a product online today and have it delivered tomorrow, the time frame for satisfaction has been shortened dramatically.
Okay then. When you absolutely positively need Primavera P6 training right away, call us!
The Wrong Way to Sample Materials
Northern California residents are well aware of the latest glitch regarding the new east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The project was already years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget (the latter can be blamed partially on former Governor Schwarzenegger, who ordered a major redesign to incorporate a signature design element) when bolts began snapping in March 2013 during final stressing. There is concern that hydrogen contamination during or after manufacturing might have made the bolts – some of which are roughly 30 feet long – brittle. Some critics believe that Caltrans specified the surfaces of the bolts to be too hard, which in term makes them more susceptible to breaking.
Remarkably, bolts failed back in 2008 as samples were being tested but Caltrans averaged the results. If one sample failed, it was deemed okay as long as another bolt exceeded the specifications for the elongation tests. Which means that essentially 50% of all samples might have failed the tests. UC Berkeley engineering professor Thomas Devine has criticized this method of sampling, as right he should have. Anyone familiar with Six Sigma quality control (my wife and business partner Francesca is a certified Black Belt) would find it ludicrous to allow so many failures – especially on a bridge designed to last 150 years in a seismically active area. Caltrans is now scrambling to engineer a fix for the broken bolts, a task complicated by the fact that the existing bolts are in a confined space and cannot be removed.
Caltrans is unsure whether this issue will delay the planned opening of the bridge on Labor Day weekend of this year. Other bolts manufactured in 2010 have so far held up during tensioning and a decision must be made as to whether to preemptively replace these bolts. As a California resident it will be difficult to “celebrate” this bridge opening. More likely it will seem like a relief that the worst is (hopefully) over.