Engineering Modern Tools for Capital Project Schedules

For decades, capital projects in construction, infrastructure, energy, and defense have relied on Oracle Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project to plan and execute complex work. While these planning engines are powerful, they present significant hurdles for the broader project team:

• Prohibitive Licensing: Project managers, superintendents, and subcontractors often need only to view, verify, and filter schedules, yet organizations are forced to buy costly authoring licenses.
• Sluggish Legacy Tools: Traditional schedule viewers frequently suffer from slow startup times, cumbersome software prerequisites, and high system resource overhead.
• Compromised Cloud Privacy: Modern web viewers often require project planners to upload proprietary, confidential multi-million-dollar project schedules to third-party cloud servers.

We created XER Reader to solve all three challenges at once: delivering a lightweight, blazing-fast viewer that opens both Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project files natively, while guaranteeing 100% data privacy by executing calculations entirely in local device memory.

The XER Reader development team brings together senior systems programmers and project controls professionals with decades of combined experience in critical path method (CPM) scheduling, defense compliance standards (DCMA 14-point metrics), and large-scale data visualization.

Our documentation, product guides, and blog tutorials are written collectively by the XER Reader Team to ensure that every workflow recommendation reflects real-world scheduling practices on major infrastructure and engineering projects.