Projects often contain large amounts of data. Users expect to rearrange and group this data to obtain subtotals and totals for status reporting. Performance problems would naturally arise if the data had to be re-calculated over and over for each minor change. To resolve these issues and to obtain accurate aggregate values representing sub-totals and totals, projects are summarized using the web summarizer. The web summarizer creates summary data and spread data. Summary data means a new summary record is created to store aggregate values for totals in columns. Spread data means a new sub-summary or spread record for each spread period is created with only the individual values for that period.
Example: You want to see resource assignments spanning multiple resources and break out the subtotals by project and WBS. By summarizing the selected projects, the database performs the calculations necessary to display subtotals for all cost and unit fields by resource, by project, by WBS, and by time period.
Many features in P6 and P6 Professional use summary enterprise or project data calculations spanning multiple records and therefore rely on the creation of up-to-the-minute summarized data. To ensure that enterprise records are current, you need to summarize projects. Summarization performs the series of calculations that update records with any new information that has been entered since the last update. Summary data tables temporarily store and share the data.
When a project is summarized, a scheduled service creates summary data for the following entities:
- All project data for a given project. This includes all the data displayed in columns in the tables on the Activities, EPS, and Resource Assignments pages.
- Project and WBS data for each financial period or week/month, including totals.
- Resources and roles by project, and totals for all projects (enterprise resource summary).
When an EPS element is summarized, a scheduled service creates summary data for the following entities:
- EPS summary records representing all project summary data for all projects within a given EPS node.
Note: Portfolio features such as Capacity Planning, Performance Status, and data in dashboard portlets require EPS summaries. If using these features in the application, you should use the scheduled job service to summarize all projects in the portfolio.
The following types of projects are not summarized:
- Templates
- Baselines
- Requested Projects
Note: Projects that are checked out in P6 Professional or opened exclusively by another user cannot be summarized even if set to Enable Summarization. Projects that are opened exclusively by another user can only be summarized by that user.