Oracle calls Primavera P6 "the standard for planning and scheduling." For most of the last three decades, that was fair. P6 gave construction a rigorous way to model how a project gets built: activities, durations, relationships, and a critical path you could defend in a claim. Nearly every serious scheduler learned on it.
Nearly every other part of the job has raised its bar since P6 arrived. Projects got bigger, faster, and more tightly sequenced. Owners stopped accepting a monthly PDF as a status update. Safety and quality programs that were optional in the '90s are now the bare minimum.
Scheduling needs more than a revision. It needs a new standard. Projects carry far more complexity than they did when P6 was designed, more of the team needs to work from the schedule, and AI can now reason over CPM data directly. The new standard should account for all three.
Yet most contractors are still scheduling like it's 1998. That gap used to be an inconvenience. Now it's a competitive liability, and it gets wider every quarter a team decides to wait.
Who we are
Planera is a modern, AI-native CPM platform built for general contractors running complex, high-stakes work. We kept everything that makes CPM rigorous: logic, critical path, float. What we changed is who gets to use it.
P6 was built around one job title. Planera is built for the whole team that has to build, update, and act on the schedule: schedulers, PMs, superintendents, and the executives who need to know where every project stands.
The new standard for construction scheduling
Here are five things every GC should expect from its scheduling software today. If your current setup can't do them, it's holding your projects back.
1. AI that actually knows your schedule
Most scheduling questions take hours to answer because someone has to dig through the schedule to find the answer. What's driving the critical path? Which activities are missing logic? What happens to the finish date if steel slips two weeks?
In Planera, you ask. Manny, Planera's AI scheduling assistant, reads the schedule the way a senior scheduler does and answers in seconds. Manny flags missing logic, open-ended activities, and shrinking float before they become bigger problems, and drafts reports in minutes instead of a day. Your schedulers still make the calls. They just stop spending their week hunting for answers.
2. See the impact of every change, right away
Schedule-quality benchmarks commonly look for 1.5 to 2 logic ties per activity. On a routine $20 million commercial job, that already means hundreds of interdependencies. Stretch it across a $500 million data center or hospital program and the network gets too dense for any one person to hold in their head. P6 can still calculate it. The trouble is everything around the calculation: who can read it, who can update it, and how fast anyone can ask it a question.
In Planera, the impact shows up as you make the change: what's now on the critical path, how much float is left, where the finish date lands. The what-if happens in the meeting, not a week after it.
3. Collaboration without giving up control
Legacy scheduling forced a choice: lock the schedule down so only trained schedulers could touch it, or let everyone in and watch the logic fall apart. Most teams chose the lock, so the field ran the work from Excel trackers and whiteboards instead.
Planera removes the tradeoff. PMs, supers, and trade partners plan their work in the same platform, and schedulers still maintain control. Everyone contributes, and the schedule stays defensible.
"By democratizing scheduling this way, Planera has helped us to make our schedules more accurate and more efficient."
— Troy S. Thompson, COO, Big-D Construction
4. Field schedules and the master schedule, in one place
Supers need a detailed, week-by-week plan. Schedulers need a master schedule that stays clean and defensible. Those should be separate plans. They shouldn't live in separate tools.
On most P6 jobs, the field plan lives in a spreadsheet or on a whiteboard, invisible to anyone outside the trailer. In Planera, field schedules sit in the same platform as the master schedule. The field plans the work in detail, the office sees all of it, and schedulers decide what makes it into the master.
"It puts scheduling back in the hands of the guys that are actually building the work."
— Todd Von Krosigk, Senior Superintendent, HITT Contracting
5. One platform, not a pile of disconnected tools
Around most P6 schedules sits a patchwork of other software: one tool for dashboards, another for risk analysis, another for quality checks, another for pull planning. None of them talk to each other well, so every answer starts with exporting, re-entering, and reconciling.
Planera puts AI, dashboards, risk simulation, DCMA-14 quality checks, and pull planning in one platform, all working from the same schedule. When an owner asks about a milestone, the answer comes from the schedule, not from whichever export went out last.
What the status quo costs
Nearly everything about how construction gets delivered has changed since P6 arrived: BIM, prefab, reality capture. The way most teams schedule has not.
Every week a senior scheduler spends re-keying updates is a week not spent on recovery plans and risk reviews. Every look-ahead rebuilt by hand is a plan that's already stale. Every question that waits for the monthly update is a problem found a month late. Across a portfolio, the status quo is costing you millions. Big-D Construction rolled Planera out across 30+ active projects and saw more than $1.5 million in ROI in the first year. They've since moved the majority of their projects to Planera.
Wait and see feels safe, but it's a risky decision to watch the builders who move first get faster, more accurate, and more competitive while you're still exporting PDFs. Five years from now, the GCs still scheduling like it's 1998 won't look careful. They'll look slow.
And the contractors making the move aren't small shops. ENR Top 400 contractors like Balfour Beatty chose Planera over P6.
"Planera has given us a faster, more transparent way to manage complex schedules. The buy-in from our team has been incredible."
— Travis McGarraugh, Special Projects Group, Balfour Beatty
If Oracle is pushing your team to move to Oracle Primavera Cloud, you're already signing up for a migration and a retraining effort. Make that move count. Hold whatever comes next to the new standard, not the old one.
P6 set the standard. Planera is raising it.
See what modern construction scheduling can do. Book a demo.
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