FlexiProject implementation at Smart Automation

Engineering Services

50+

projects running in parallel

1000+

projects delivered

100%

of staff use FlexiProject

300+

years of team experience

Smart Automation

Smart Automation is a Polish industrial automation and robotics integrator based in Olsztyn, active since 2009. It delivers complete automation and production robotization solutions: from machine concepts and feasibility studies, through control systems programming (PLC, HMI, SCADA), vision systems and control cabinets, to the construction of special-purpose machines, commissioning, service and staff training.

Its team of engineers combines experience in automation, robotics and mechatronics gained on projects delivered in Poland and abroad for clients such as IKEA, Michelin, Siemens Energy, Unilever and Danone. In practice, this means dozens of projects running in parallel, differing in scale, complexity and location.

Implementation context

Smart Automation earns its revenue from projects, so budget control has always been a priority. Budgets were kept in solutions bolted onto the ERP system, where invoices and costs reside. In daily work, this proved cumbersome: every manager coped in their own way, and putting projects side by side required manual effort and reconciling figures.

There was also no place for schedules, risks and resource planning, that is, no complete view of either a single project or the portfolio. Hence the decision to implement a dedicated project management system in which all of this information comes together in one environment and which became the single source of truth about projects.

Scope of the FlexiProject implementation

The migration took three months and covered the whole organization: all ongoing undertakings, more than 50 projects of varying scale, were moved into the system, and access was granted to all employees and key subcontractors. The implementation was not limited to transferring data. Its core was building a company-wide project management standard, which includes:

a project charter and a phase model, that is, a uniform way of opening and running every undertaking,
schedule templates with a Gantt chart, task dependencies and milestones,
baselines as the reference point for schedule and cost deviations,
project budgets integrated with the ERP system, so that time and financial costs flow between systems without double entry,
a risk register and project report templates,
time tracking, including mobile, developed by the FlexiProject team to the company’s needs,
recurring project reviews based on data from the system.

The flexible structure made it possible to go a step further: sales offers and warranty and post-warranty service were also mapped in the system. FlexiProject therefore supports the full order cycle, from quotation to after-sales care.

What drove rapid adoption

Three elements determined that the team actually works in the system. The first was the attitude of the management: from day one the CEO made it clear that project information is complete only when it is in the system, and held managers accountable for regular updates.

The second was a low entry barrier. Schedules and budgets are built in FlexiProject intuitively enough that training was run on live material: every manager started by entering their own project, not by practicing on examples. The third was cooperation with the FlexiProject team, which developed the system to the company’s specific needs: mobile time tracking, an extended scheduling module and ERP integration.

Results of the implementation

The most noticeable change concerns the financial perspective. Before the implementation, the company analyzed mainly costs already incurred. Today every project has an approved baseline against which budget deviations are measured, together with a forecast of costs to completion. Management and managers know in advance where a project’s result is heading and can react before a deviation grows.

The second area is workload and resources. Working time is analyzed at the level of a single project and the whole organization, and departmental utilization has become a hard input to management decisions: which bids to pursue and when to start recruiting. Planning stopped relying on intuition.

The rhythm of portfolio work is set by project reviews: every two weeks for undertakings in execution and monthly for projects in planning or of lower complexity. The basis of the discussion is system data, without manually assembling presentations. At the strategic level, management analyzes the portfolio structure against the company strategy using project attributes.

An implementation that never ends

At Smart Automation they emphasize that implementing the system is not a project with an end date. Employees report comments and improvement ideas on a daily basis, and the company treats this stream of information as proof of the team’s engagement and real use of the tool. Further areas, such as developing reporting or deeper use of resource data, are developed iteratively, in the rhythm of business needs.