Integrating Primavera and SAP Cuts NPPD Shutdown Costs and Boosts Scheduling Accuracy

The Reliability in Action department showcases reader‑submitted case studies. To have yours featured, email parnold@noria.com or mail Reliable Plant, P.O. Box 87, Fort Atkinson, WI 53538. If we publish your study, we’ll send you an official Reliable Plant T‑shirt. Here’s this issue’s contribution:

The company: The Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) is the largest electric utility in Nebraska, serving 1 million customers across 91 of the state’s 93 counties. It operates multiple generating plants, 5,000 miles of transmission lines, and employs 2,100 staff.

The challenge: NPPD’s Brownville nuclear plant is shut down every 18 months. Each outage costs $25 million in material and labor, plus $10–15 million in lost revenue. With a loss of $450,000 per day, the goal is to complete outages in under 25 days. A typical shutdown involves 12,000 tasks, 1,500 workers, and up to 500 concurrent daily activities.

Managing such a complex schedule requires both Primavera and SAP. Primavera, in use since the 1980s, delivers flexible scheduling and robust reporting, while SAP manages financial data and work execution.

Before integration, project managers had to export 12,000 tasks from SAP and manually build detailed Primavera plans. The lack of a seamless data flow made reporting inaccurate, disrupted schedules, and extended project timelines.

“During our last planned outage, the absence of integration between schedules and resource data caused significant cost overruns,” said Mark Gillian, assistant to the plant manager.

The solution: NPPD adopted Impress for EPM, a turnkey integration platform that synchronizes project data between Primavera and SAP. It automates data entry, keeps resource and material availability in sync, and ensures Primavera schedules reflect the latest SAP information. The solution also aligns daily maintenance planning, reducing forced shutdowns.

The benefits: The integrated system has cut weekly scheduling effort in half, eliminated duplicate data entry, and improved schedule adherence and accuracy. By restricting master‑schedule edits to authorized users, project managers maintain tighter control and confidence in the data.

Real‑time schedule, cost, and resource visibility empowers NPPD leadership to respond swiftly to outages, minimizing downtime and protecting revenue.

The results:

• Saved over 100 man‑hours per week in schedule development and maintenance.

• Reduced outage duration, lowering costs and lost revenue.

• Improved outage response time.

• Enhanced schedule accuracy.

• Eliminated duplicate data entry.

• Maintained consistent dates and task relationships across Primavera and SAP.