1. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 1
Business & Technical Lessons Learned from a Post-Merger P6
Integration Project
Greg Hunt
GenOn Energy
Patricia Champagne
GenOn Energy
Background
GenOn Energy is a competitive energy company that produces and sells electricity in the United States. It
operates an asset management and energy marketing organization from its headquarters in Houston
Texas.
GenOn operates 47 generating stations located in 12 states that have a combined capacity of 23,692
Megawatts.

2. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 2
GenOn’s customers include the following:
Utilities: Generate, transmit, and distribute power to retail or wholesale customers.
Municipal systems: Owned and/or operated by a city that generates and/or purchases electricity.
Aggregators: Marketers who pool customers to buy large volumes of power.
Electric-cooperative utilities: Utilities owned by and operated for the benefit of those using the service.
The utility company generates, transmits, and/or distributes supplies of power to a specified area not
being serviced by another utility.
Generators: Produce electricity intended to be sold at wholesale.
Marketers: Entities that become an owner or controller of power for the purpose of buying and selling the
power at wholesale.
GenOn Energy was formed through the merger of Mirant and RRI Energy in December 2010. The two
companies were very similar in size and business model.
This merger increased the diversity and scale of operation.

3. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 3
The strategic rationale for the merger included:
• Significant near-term value creation driven by annual cost savings of $150 million
• Strengthened balance sheet and enhanced financial flexibility
• Increased scale and geographic diversity across key regions
• Well positioned to benefit from improvement in market fundamentals
Cost Savings was a particularly important goal:
• $150 million in annual cost savings
• Achieved through reduction in corporate overhead and G&A, including:
o Consolidating two headquarters
o Accounting, finance, human resources, administrative
o IT systems
o Costs to achieve of $125 million
• Expected run-rate cost savings fully realized starting in January 2012
Consolidating the two headquarters would result in the elimination of the headquarters and data center in
Atlanta.
To achieve these cost savings, the company initiated a large number if IT integration projects. What
follows are lessons learned from one of those - a project to integrate and upgrade the two legacy P6
systems and to replace the legacy ERP integration components with the latest connector from SAP. This
project’s objectives included the following:
• Merge P6 Databases into a Single Database & Environment
• Provide a 2-way Interface between SAP and P6
• Minimize Loss of Capability for Either User Group

4. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 4
The following illustrates the resulting environment:
What Follows
This paper describes 75 things that GenOn P6 integration project team members learned in managing
this project. Although some items cross boundaries, we’ve them broken down into 4 main areas:
• IT & Business Culture
• Staffing
• Planning
• Technical
Some of these are things we followed and others are ones we didn’t but would if we were to do this again.
Others are things that weren’t necessarily applicable to us, but having gone through this we decided to
include them because they came to mind and we thought they might apply to you. Many will just seem
like common sense. But our hope is that if you are faced with a project of this type, you can find 1 or 2
tips that will help your integration go more smoothly.

5. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 5
IT & Business Culture
Define the IT Culture Up Front
You need to define the IT culture, so that users and IT staff approach the IT work with a jointly understood
philosophy, set of expectations and method of interacting with one another.
To do this, you will first need to avoid making assumptions. We recommend you ask very deliberate
questions about your IT culture in each organization. Find out where the companies are different, and
what you want the IT culture in the new company to be. Then share that information.
If you don’t “share” the answer, then both IT staff and users are going to assume that IT’s philosophy,
service levels, and methods of interacting with the user community, “should” be, exactly what they had in
the old company.
Here are some questions you might ask each of the merging companies, and the new company:
• Is IT viewed mostly as a source of cost or the key to improving operations?
• Does the company value IT stability or innovation more?
• Is IT centralized or de-centralized?
• Does IT primarily take direction from rank-in-file users, cross-site and cross-functional committees, or
managers (top-down)?
• Does IT bring in contractors when taking on new bold work, or does IT do most of the work itself?
• Is IT work done all in one country or multiple countries? Does the IT team have experience with that?
• Do teams of specialists coordinate to execute work, or do you rely on jack-of-all trade types?
• Do you regularly upgrade and pay maintenance?
• Is the company normally an early, middle or late adopter of technology? If it varies, what are the
criteria?
• Does the company try to run everything from one vendor’s suite, or does it prefer to buy “best of
breed” and integrate them?
• Does the company always look first for available commercial solutions, or does it often build
applications in house?
• Does IT respond mostly to departmental needs, or does it prefer to sponsor enterprise initiatives
where there are common needs?
• Does IT encourage end-users to do technical work or lock things down in favor of IT doing
everything?
• Does IT support administrative and operations groups equally, or are some departments favored over
others?
• Is the company process driven, or do things operate in a more ad-hoc fashion?
• What terms does IT use and what do they mean? What’s a major project? What is a production
issue? Does Urgent mean we fix it in a day, or we fix it in two weeks?
• What will the service level agreements be with users?
• How much do established plans drive daily activity vs. squeaky wheels?
• Who runs IT projects? Where do they reside?
• Are project managers PMPs?
• Does IT have specific methodologies that they follow?

6. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 6
Define the Business Culture Up Front
You also need to define the business culture so that the two company’s user groups work well together.
Ask questions about your Business culture in each organization. Define the gaps and what you want to be
and share it. Here are a few questions you might want to ask:
• Do people work collaboratively, or do they compete with each other inside the company?
• What gets more emphasis team performance, or individual performance?
• Is the company more strategically driven or tactically driven?
• Are decisions made top down, or are employees highly empowered to make them.
• How are performance measures viewed by employees – as tools to help them, or weapons used
against them?
• Does the company have unions? What is the approach to working with them, and the relationship
with them?
• What is the company’s philosophy toward safety? ethics?, security? fiscal responsibility? community
relations? working with regulators? employee working conditions? Etc.
• Do people follow common processes, or do they often “wing it”
• Does the company value stability or innovation more?
• Are skilled people such as Primavera schedulers centralized or distributed throughout the
organization?
• How has each company been impacted by change? Has one been through more M&A activity than
the other, more organic growth or contraction, more layoffs, mass retirements, labor unrest, etc.?
• Is the company focused more on operations or projects?
• What is it about the company, that people outside the company admire? What about people inside
the company?
• What is the asset mix – type, size, age, location, profitability, etc. How does that influence culture?
• How does compensation and skill level compare to the average for the industry. Does the company
tend to run with a small number of highly skilled and highly paid workers, or a larger number of less
skilled/less well-paid workers?
• How technological savvy is the general employee?
• Does the company tend to formally train users on new processes and systems, or leave them to their
own devices?
• Are executives mostly numbers-focused, or are they hands-on types that get in involved with
operations?
• What is more valued in managers – their business knowledge, or their skills in managing people?
• What will be the company’s core values?
• How different was the demographic make-up of two companies?
• What about formality, and local culture?
• What is the educational make-up of the workforce?
• How is compensation managed? How were bonuses handed out in the different companies? How
deep did they go and how were they awarded?

7. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 7
Frame the Application’s Role in the New Company.
One company had Primavera as a departmental application. All the users worked for the same manager
so that department could make all the decisions. The other company had Primavera as an enterprise
application with users spread across multiple business units. A team of representatives made decisions
jointly.
If you have this situation, you need to be intentional and up front about which approach are you going to
go with so that your IT support and business decision making models are designed accordingly.
Make People Feel Safe Being Candid.
During a transition like this, people are often agreeable about everything in order to show they are team
players, open minded, willing to change and “bought-in” to the new company direction. However, often
times, one side is missing experience and the other has the experience and knows something isn’t right
or alternatively, that something can be done. Management needs to demonstrate that they do not equate
being candid and politely critical as being against change as long as it is expressed with good will and is
truthful. We need people to tell the truth hopefully with style, but not with so much sugar coating that
nobody hears it.
If You Don’t Know Something, Say-So and then Find Out.
This type of project is different in that servers and applications are moving in large numbers. If in the old
world, you could count on knowing if something happened by what you heard in your team’s staff
meeting, that may not be the case now. During the transition, the changes can outrun the
communications system. This is important because people diagnose problems based on what others tell
them. For example, it took us a while to diagnose some performance issues because our data about the
location and configuration of our servers was out of date. It wasn’t until we pinged the servers for their
location and logged in to personally see their as-built configurations that we were able to accurately
diagnose the issue.
Communicate Liberally.
You may need to communicate more information than you normally did in the past because you can’t
assume that one user group has the same experience as the other user group. For example, one
company had users log into multiple databases when testing while the other company had centralized
testing. So, when we sent a note out for people to log into a test database, only one of the groups knew
how to do that - the other group had never had to select a database before.
Don’t Assume What Didn’t Work in One Company Won’t Work in the New One.
One company had experienced numerous java conflicts when running web-based applications on the
user’s workstation. This was the case when they first rolled out P6 so they hosted P6 Web via Citrix. They
assumed we’d have to do this in the new company, but the other company had not experienced Java
conflicts so we tried running it locally and it worked.
Expect Decisions to Take Longer.
The combination of a new management team and so many integration projects means that many people
are just figuring out how decisions will be made. They may need time to understand the operational

8. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 8
process details and the politics in the company they merged into so they have both perspectives. Once
they have that down, then they may need additional time to decide what the process will actually be for
making the decision.
Staffing
Find Out Who Your Sales Rep Is Early. Oracle May Want to Assign Someone Different.
You are now a bigger company. And you may have a different product mix. You might find that Oracle
wants to change your sales rep. That happened to us and it took a while to get one assigned.
Assign a New Oracle Support Administrator BEFORE the Current Ones are Gone!
If all of your Oracle Support Administrators are on the list to be severed, have them assign someone else
as administrator BEFORE they exit! If you let them get away without doing that, Oracle will make you go
through some hoops to get a new one.
Get Everybody on a Common Oracle Support CIS Early.
After you merge, you will probably have two different Oracle Support CIS numbers. You can set it up so
that people can be members of both, but admin is easiest if you assign all users to one. Then they can
see the history and work collaboratively on issues. We recommend doing this right away.
Find Out Who Is Relocating and Allow Time For That. Also Allow For Trips Home, Etc.
You need to find out who is relocating and allow time for it. They will need to look for a place, get a
driver’s license, etc. and may make trips home. And expect that not everything in the office will work for
them at first- conference room scheduling, network connections, printers, etc. And, if you relocate, your
machine may still synch back to a server at the old location - turn off synchronization and find a place in
the new location to store your data.
If You Have Retirement Eligible Workers on Staff, Expect Some Of Them to Choose
That Over the New Company.
We had some veteran P6 users who had been outages schedulers since the early days of P3. We lost
1/3 of them. If people can retire, they might find that easier than learning SAP, going through another P6
conversion, etc.
Define Roles and Responsibilities
Does the DBA run maintenance scripts or an application developer? Who performs user testing? You
need to define roles and responsibilities for both IT and business staff.
Make Sure Some People Staying with the Company Go to the Integration Meetings.
Some of the people with knowledge that you don’t want to lose may be on the list of people to be severed
because, perhaps, they aren’t willing to relocate. It seems natural to want to get them on the integration
teams so you can capture their knowledge before they leave. But make sure you also include the people
that will have to implement the decisions in the future.

9. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 9
Include BOTH Technical and Business Application Owners in the Integration Meetings.
You need both technical and business application owners at the meetings. There is an impact to BOTH
the technical side and the people/process side.
Make Sure Every Application Has An IT Owner and a Business Owner From Day 1.
You don’t have time to delay the project waiting for people to be hired or assigned.
Be Flexible on Severance Dates.
To be fair to employees, you are going to want to make the severance decisions as early as possible so
that affected employees and make plans. Leave some flexibility in the severance policy and some
contingency in budgets to shorten or extend severance dates to accommodate for what you learn as the
integration period progresses.
Consider Attitude As Well As Business and Technical Knowledge When Setting
Severance Dates
Many were impressed by the helpfulness and dedication of many individuals all the way through their final
days in the company. They worked hard and were generous in their knowledge transfer. In most cases
attitude was as important as skills and knowledge.
Use Outgoing Staff For Infrastructure Work, One-Time Work, Knowledge Transfer and
Documentation and Retained Staff For Application Work.
It is easy to let your outgoing staff do application work – especially if they are the only ones who know the
application. But the people who have to support it in the future won’t know it. You need the outgoing staff
to spend time documenting details well and training the new staff. Let the retained staff do the install,
configuration, etc. while the outgoing staff are still around – to the degree you can.
Use Contractors. But Mostly For 1-Time Tasks & Knowledge Transfer
Outgoing staff and contractors can do 1-time tasks and be brought in to augment knowledge where yours
is short.
Go to the Other Person’s Location.
You need to go out and see how people use applications. And, if ½ your new company is going to switch
ERP systems, the ones who know the ERP system that is being retained can really help the sites that are
learning it during the transition.
Create a merger PMO office prior to the merger.
You are going to need people focused on this.

10. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 10
Planning
Build a CPM Schedule for Merger Activities
Construct a CPM schedule for the entire merger process. Start early on this. This will allow you to move
forward with more of the work, yet allow executives to focus on the key things.
Know the Schedule For Moving the Other Apps.
Everybody needs to know the schedule for moving applications.
Plan around Infrastructure Moves
It is important to know the schedule for moving infrastructure. You wouldn’t want, for example, to time
your P6 project migration to occur at the same time that they were performing the active directory domain
migration.
Time Conversions Based on Business Considerations.
You also need to consider business considerations. For example, if you use P6 with your ERP system for
planning outages as we do, you are going to want to time system cutovers such that profitable plants with
large outages cut over well before the outage season.
Allow Extra Time for Hardware & Other Setup Requests.
Prior to the merger, you might have been able to get a virtual machine in a couple of hours and a server
setup in a day or two. During the integration period in the new company, it may take much longer
because so many other application integration teams are also requesting infrastructure. You may need to
plan weeks ahead with your requests.
If you are Moving to Primavera Release 8.0 or 8.1, Give Yourself Time with P6 Web
With Oracle Primavera 8.0 or later, you will do your entire configuration via P6 web. If you are used to
working with the windows client, you will need to allow a little more time for this. Also, if IT does not have
experience with Primavera Web, you have an entire new infrastructure to build-out. This is especially the
case if you choose, as we did, to place it in the DMZ which meant that we had to wait in line with other
applications (remember they are all moving) to schedule things like intrusion tests.
If you are Relocating your Primavera Servers, Plan so as to minimize the Outage Time.
If you have to move your servers from one city to another, you could have a long outage. If you have
clustered servers, you can leave one in the old location with users connected while you ship and
configure the other. If you only have a single server, then you may have to build out a new one, or take
some downtime.

11. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 11
If a Decision Requires a Committee – Form That Immediately!
It seemed like every decision being made in the new company required a committee. And it took longer,
sometimes WAY longer than in the past for committees to make decisions because you had to allow time
for one side of the business to teach the other side about all their needs.
If You Don’t Have Dev/Test Environments, You Need to Build Them.
Sometimes companies don’t have this because they simply don’t upgrade very often, or can take the
downtime to upgrade production without going through development and test. But a merger is likely to
result in so much change, that you are definitely going to want this capability.
If You are Going to Integrate Systems, Train People on Both First
People will make design and configuration decisions based on what they know so getting them the
knowledge they need is important. Up front training is like the development and test environments - it
takes precious time up front, but you gain it back in the long run.
If Systems are to be Integrated, Plan Well in Advance for Synchronized Test Data.
For example, if you are integrating P6 with your ERP system and, to test the interface, you need both the
ERP test data and the Primavera test data to be refreshed from production at the same time, you will
need to coordinate with the ERP team because they are probably also migrating and integrating other
applications and may not be able to refresh their test data right when you want them to.
First, Get on One System and Minimize Change Backwards or Forwards
At a joint process design meeting with hundreds of plant people in attendance, when someone suggested
that we take Primavera Web updates out of the process, the co-leader of our Fleetwide Steering
Committee said – “we aren’t going backwards!” That “line in the sand” set a reasonable requirements
baseline. We also saw that we did not have the staff in place to do anything more than that. The critical
thing for us was to get to a point where we only needed to support one system. We knew if we could get
there, then adding new features would be much easier. So we immediately planned phase II and just
made it clear to the user community – year 1 is about getting us one to a single system and the
infrastructure in place – don’t look for business improvement. But year 2 will be a different story. The
primary exception to this for us was that, since the two companies were on different systems and different
versions, resulting in our having to export all projects into a new environment, it made sense for us to
make that environment the newest version – so in essence, we did upgrade.
If You Plan Forward Change Anyway, Impose It on Those Not Learning a New ERP
System
We long ago learned that if we are at a meeting of the Primavera Steering Committee and we are seeking
a plant to volunteer to do something new, say pilot Oracle’s new Primavera Mobile Update feature for
example, if we schedule that meeting in the middle of an outage where everybody is working 12 hours a
day, 7 days a week, we wouldn’t get volunteers. But if we wait until the outage season is over, and people
have some time off, the answer is often different. The same is true if people are in the middle of
converting to a new ERP system – they won’t have time or mental bandwidth for anything else. So you
might look to the sites that aren’t going through that change for candidates.

12. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 12
Technical
Create Multiple Databases.
We created 4 databases: one for P6-SAP integration testing, one to serve as the staging location for
moving xRRI projects, one to serve as the staging area for moving xMirant projects, and one for
production. Although this represented a little extra overhead, it worked really well as each of the 3 teams
could work independently, make and restore backups as they needed them, etc.
Get your IT specialists on a Common Support Account Right Away
You might assign a person from one of the companies to work on something where they end up logging a
support issue. They could easily get pulled off to work on infrastructure while their counterpart from the
other company takes over. You want that person to be able to see the support request.
Log Every Issue with Oracle While Trying to Solve It
When you log an issue with Oracle, you aren’t likely to get it solved on the day you submit it. And who
needs Oracle’s help since our people are problem solvers, right? But they can lose valuable time or get
pulled off to work on something else only to find that they are going to need Oracle’s help after all. What
worked best for us was to log the issue, then try to solve it ourselves in parallel.
Divide up the Literature
Primavera’s admin guides are intimidating – collectively they add up to thousands of pages. But if you
break it down, the Citrix guidance is less than a dozen pages, and the DBA script pages are less than 3
dozen. Those guys have LOTS of applications to support and are also performing infrastructure moves.
Help the backend support folks out by dividing the books up and sending them just what they need to
know.
Develop a Tool to Help You Look For Duplicate Calendars
• How many global calendars do you have? 500? 1000?
• How many duplicates do you have in terms of workdays, work times and exceptions?
• How many duplicates would have too many calendars and duplicates if you merged databases
with another company?

13. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 13
Many administrators like to work with MS Access to handle administrative tasks like calendar cleanup.
However, if your projects are in an Oracle database, you cannot easily read the calendar blob fields.
However this process will allow you to view them and look for duplicates. You can then create a strategy
for cleaning them up.
1. Install P6 Stand-alone with MS SQL on your 2
nd
PC
2. Create 2 databases.
3. In each production DB, create a project with one activity representing each calendar with the
calendar it is representing assigned as its calendar. Export it from production, and import it into a
single MS-SQL database on the stand alone machine. You can now easily read the calendar blob
field and find duplicate calendars.
Other Things You Will Want to Use MS Access or Another Tool to Do
• Make a global calendar a project-level calendar
• Swap out one calendar for another (e.g. a duplicate for the original so that I can then delete the
duplicate).
• Make a global activity code a project-level activity code
• Merge activity codes
• Swap out the old ERP-centric activity IDs, resource IDs, etc. with the New ERP-centric data
Consider 3rd
Party Tools
We went out and bought a 3
rd
party tool called XENA to map activity codes, resource IDs, etc. from what
they were in the old systems to what they needed to be in the new one. That was a big help once we had
the templates established. It sped things up, and helped assure consistency.
Give System Administrators a 2nd
PC
When you merge the companies, you will free up some PCs. Give one to each of the business user doing
the migrations. They will be doing conversion work (e.g. project exporting) and testing which can involve
long running processes. This way one machine can be running those processes, while the person does
other work on their regular PC.
Get the IT Components in Synch
It took us a while to discover that a single dll was causing trouble with our ODBC access. Every layer
needs to be right.
Prioritize Correction of Performance Issues
It makes sense that with so much needing to be done, if something works at all, you are going to want to
leave it alone. But if performance is an issue, you are going to want to correct it if you are moving projects
from one system to another via import/export. Otherwise, you could have a long outage.
If You Aren’t Merging Domains Quickly, Disable LDAP Right Away
Primavera’s LDAP feature cannot access more than one domain. Eliminating LDAP lets you provide
users access to both systems right away.

14. COLLABORATE 12 — OAUG Forum 14
If You Migrate Projects Via Export/Import, Make Sure Citrix Is Mapped to a Drive in the
Data Center
If you export projects via Citrix and you normally do that to client drives, you need go into the Citrix box
and map to a drive in the data center to speed volume exports.
Don’t Bring Over Everything
We didn’t bring over all the projects. We told the users we would upgrade and retain the legacy database
for reference if they absolutely needed the project.
Use Codes to Flag Projects for Migration
In moving projects, we had the plants flag which ones were templates that could be brought over any
time, and which ones they wanted to keep in the old system until the very last minute. They used project
codes for that, and it was helpful.
Create Integration Check Layouts
If you are integrating P6 with an ERP system or something else where lots of data is exchanged, create
a layout with all the integration fields displayed an a similar report in the other system. That way you can
compare data side by side.
Have a Cleanup Database between the Old Database and Production
We had staging databases which we imported the projects into. There was one for xRRI projects, and
one for xMirant projects. This provided the following advantages”:
1. One user could refresh his database any time he needed to with a clean configuration-perfect
version of the empty production database without affecting the other user
2. we could run MS Access scripts against it to swap and delete calendars and activity codes
Once the project’s configuration met the merged-company standard, we exported it out and into
production.
Pay Attention to Citrix Home Directories
If the Citrix servers are in the new headquarters location, and the user’s home directory is still in the other
city, you are going to experience performance issues. Change you configuration so that the home
directory is in the same data center as the Citrix server.
Construct As-Build Documentation
We did not have as-built documentation from the earlier integration vendors which made it more difficult
to generate the functional specifications for the post-merger solution. We did get them for the new
solution which has been important since we’ve made so many changes.
Create a SharePoint Site for Central System Migration
SharePoint proved to be a great tool for posting application latest rollover dates, conversion data, etc.