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Migrating from OPRA to Safran Risk: A User Guide

November 14, 2019 |   | 
4 minutes read
Richard Wood

Richard Wood

Oracle Primavera Risk Analysis (OPRA) has been a staple of the project controls community for over 30 years — and for good reason. Nevertheless, we’re regularly contacted by project managers looking to switch from OPRA to Safran Risk.

 

All the same, the prospect of migrating to a completely new system is a daunting one. So much so that you might consider sticking with your existing risk management platform simply because it’s easier than trying to get to grips with a completely new UI; not to mention far less time-consuming than transferring across thousands of individual activities. This is a false economy.

An unsuitable or poorly configured risk management system can negatively impact everything from the accuracy of schedule/cost forecasts, to your ability to establish appropriate contingencies for project risk.

So, in an effort to help OPRA users who’re in the process of migrating to our system hit the ground running, we’ve written this comprehensive guide. As well as easing you through every stage of the journey, it provides in-depth analysis of the key features of Safran Risk to facilitate a quick and easy transition.

 

Watch our in-depth webinar to learn how to quickly and easily migrate from OPRA  to Safran Risk

 

Building an Accurate Model for Risk Analysis

The first stage of the process is the most intimidating for the majority of new users: building the risk model itself. We understand how challenging risk modelling can be. Fortunately, Safran Risk is here to help. Developed by the team behind Pertmaster (now Oracle Primavera), our software makes modelling simple.

Safran Risk is a modern, process-driven, and intuitive software package that brings together the best features of OPRA with a handful of cutting-edge features. Together, this helps project managers build accurate risk models in a fraction of the time — without sacrificing the surface level detail they need to gain a comprehensive understanding of the risks that threaten project success.

To support this, Safran Risk is designed to receive data from all major third-party systems; whether that’s OPRA, Microsoft Project, or even Excel. Entire risk models can even be imported directly to Safran Risk, saving users significant amounts of time and effort.

Once your model has been built/imported and stored within Safran’s single risk register, automatic monitoring tools look for potential issues within the model, identifying the specific factors that could compromise the integrity of your analysis. From a practical standpoint, this allows you to:

  • Modify the project schedule in real-time, automatically compensating for any changes in activity duration, probability etc.
  • Provide dynamic schedule warnings
  • Run several scenarios simultaneously without having to reconfigure your data
  • Facilitate multiple uncertainties, assessing the result different issues will have on your original estimates
  • Apply multiple risks to a single task

More importantly, Safran Risk is capable of creating huge schedules (circa 20,000 activities) at the cost of only marginal slowdown in performance.

Together, this powers what we call the 4 key inputs of risk modelling: schedule, risk, impact, and correlation. This allows you to work out which risks are the biggest threat to individual activities and, by extension, the wider schedule.

Analyzing Risk: Outputs and Reporting

Once the model has been created and fully populated, users can start producing accurate risk reports.

A key feature of this is speed. Thanks to our real-time risk analyser and automatic sensitivity analysis, you don’t have to enter risks or adjust values manually. This saves valuable time that would otherwise be spent modifying each individual aspect of your model every time you need to update it. It also provides more reliable data (delivered instantly in real-time) from which you can gauge the impact of previously identified risks on your initial project schedule or cost estimates — at any stage of the project life cycle.

This helps you streamline the reporting process, facilitating a more accurate, reliable, and comprehensive class of risk reporting that enables:

  • Monitoring and validating of schedules from a qualitative risk analysis perspective
  • Critical path analysis and criticality (highlighting which of the established paths are the main driving forces behind project end date)
  • Trending reports over multiple review cycles, all saved at the database level
  • Calculate risk impact using correlation coefficient or number of days impacted
  • Combine pre and post-mitigated analyses within a single analysis

Moreover, outputs are presented in a variety of standard, digestible graph types (including tornado charts) to make it easier for stakeholders — for whom technical jargon like correlation values have little meaning — to understand the results.

The combination of these factors allows you to compile an entire series of reports from a single, all-encompassing risk register; each geared towards specific types of analyses or trends currently under investigation.

There are certain features OPRA users will recognize — such as impact override at the activity assignment level, probabilistic cashflow, distribution comparison histograms, and lag conversion — that are not included in Safran. However, many of these are on the agenda and will be added to Safran Risk in the coming months as part of our ongoing mission to iterate upon our existing software.

Integrating Cost and Schedule Risk Analysis

The diversity of outputs and reports mentioned above form the backbone of the project manager’s risk analysis capabilities.

As such, those interested solely in cost risk analysis can use Safran to gain meaningful insights into initial budget estimates and the potential impact risk events will have upon them should they occur.

This is possible at any stage: from discovery and bid, all the way through to execution and closeout. Additionally, accurate cost risk analysis can be performed without a schedule, should it suit your current requirements.

On top of that, Safran Risk is a powerful integrated cost and schedule risk management tool.

Model uncertainty, formula editing, joint schedule/cost confidence level reporting, deterministic cashflow, focus costs/risks, data import/export — everything can be performed at any point in the cost breakdown or schedule, based on the same data set for improved accuracy. Project managers thus have access to the information they need to create robust yet flexible schedules and accurate cost estimates.

What’s more, our integrated cost and schedule risk analysis is available from a single, consolidated platform. Delivered via an intuitive user interface that’s fully interoperable with all mainstream project management software (including Primavera and Microsoft Project), this provides considerable savings in both time and cost.

Quite simply, integrated cost and schedule risk analysis dramatically improves the quality of the insights at your disposal. Hence why we describe it as providing the ultimate in analysis integrity.

Hassle-free Migration

Although we’ve tried to give you a comprehensive overview of the capabilities of Safran Risk, it’s fair to say we’ve only scratched the surface.

If you’d like to learn more about the process of migrating from OPRA (or any other risk management system) to Safran Risk, watch our comprehensive on-demand webinar.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any further questions. We look forward to hearing from you.