Taking advantage of Import Configurations in P6

In this situation, the scheduler is sending exporting his schedule and sending it to a
subcontractor who is updating durations and relationships. When he imports the schedule
back in, new relationships are added. However, invalid relationships that the
subcontractor deleted remained after the import and he was correcting these manually. He
could have addressed this problem by using a different import configuration.

We will use a three activity project to demonstrate this. In Test, Activities 1,2, and 3 are
linked sequentially in Finish-to-Start relationships.

Test is exported so the subcontractor can update it. The sub changes the relationship
between Activity 1 and 2 to a Start-to-Start and sends it back to the scheduler, who
imports it using Update Existing Project.

For the Update Project Options, he uses the Default Configuration.

If you click Modify, you will have options for setting the import action on particular
categories as well as setting the Delete Flag. Update Existing, for example, means that
the record will add any new data but any old data remains; it is not deleted. Also, if you
set the Delete flag, it will delete items not in the file being imported. With the Default
Configuration, the Import Actions are all set to Update or Keep and there are no
Delete flags set.

The result is the shedulers project now has two relationships from Activity 1 to Activity
2. One is the original Finish-to-Start and the other is the Start-to-Start added by the
subcontractor.

To get only the Start-to-Start relationship, the scheduler could create a new import
configuration by clicking Add on the Update Project Options and creating a new import
configuration. In this configuration, named Relationships, the Delete checkbox is
checked for Relationships.

By using this new configuration, the project will import the new Start-to-Start
relationship and delete any other relationships.
The Delete flag does not work on any global data items, but you have other options in
those cells. The result in this case, is the project imports with the subcontractors
changes.