2012 NPUG (Nuclear Primavera User Group) Conference

After attending the 2012 NPUG (Nuclear Primavera User Group) conference in Palm Beach, Florida, it became very clear that there are a lot of passionate people involved with this group that are working to improve not only the Primavera product but to discuss the best practices of other facilities in our industry for all to reap a benefit. We started out as a very small group several years ago and have grown to what we thought was potentially 50-55 interested persons/utility/vendor representatives for this years conference and were astounded at the over 90 people in attendance. Additionally, with the interest Primavera / ORACLE has shown in assisting the group, as well as, the foresight into software issues and performance problems, the presentations throughout the full 2 days were very informative and helpful to those of us present. Several utilities had been considering a new product and the seminar presentations allowed attendees to actually speak to other users, as well as, see product demo’s and product outputs displayed. That is very useful when compiling business cases to management. The attendees also did smaller breakout meetings based on the functional groups supported back on our respective sites: Engineering Project Scheduling, On-line Scheduling and Outage Scheduling. These smaller groups focused in on their use of the tool, issues with the tools, and some best practices. Both days were structured similarly and much information passed amongst the attendees, some from utility members and some from vendors. The issues list was compiled and forwarded back to Primavera for ranking for resolution. I found most attendees favorite discussions occurred during the pre-seminar cocktail hour. Those discussions proved to contain some interesting conversation regarding what each attendee expected to get out of the two information packed days. Surprisingly, the second night’s cocktail hour discussions were geared to the wealth of information attained during the days proceedings. So, all in all, I would venture to call the 2012 NPUG conference a success to all in attendance. I know that I came away from the conference feeling like it was time well spent. I would encourage all Primavera users to become a member of your industry type user groups and participate, participate, participate…. If there is no user group established in your industry, there are also global Primavera User Groups and some local chapter Primavera User Groups, as well as, LinkedIn user groups.  Become involved! It’s a very rewarding experience.