Project management system implementation in an engineering company: a case study

An industrial automation company with dozens of projects running at once

Smart Automation is an engineering company based in Olsztyn, Poland, active in industrial automation since 2009. It designs and delivers complete automation systems: from machine concepts and feasibility studies, through control systems programming and vision systems, to robotization of production processes and construction of special-purpose machines. The team combines over 300 years of cumulative experience in automation, robotics, and mechatronics.

The company has delivered more than 1,000 projects in Poland and abroad for clients such as IKEA, Michelin, Siemens Energy, Unilever, and Danone. In practice, this means dozens of implementation projects running at the same time, differing in scale, complexity, and location. As with managing projects in a manufacturing company, coordinating people, deadlines, and money at this scale stops being a matter of individual memory and becomes a process that needs system support. A condensed overview of this deployment, with a photo gallery, is available in the Smart Automation case study.

Starting point: budgets in ERP and no complete view of projects

Because Smart Automation earns its revenue from projects, budget control has always been the company’s top priority. Project budgets were managed through solutions built around the ERP system, since that is where invoices, payments, and costs live. For users, however, this setup proved difficult to work with, and every project manager developed their own method of controlling and planning project finances.

At the same time, the company lacked tools for building schedules, monitoring risks, and planning resources. There was no complete view of a single project, let alone the whole portfolio. That was the moment to look for a dedicated project management system that would connect schedules, budgets, risks, and resources in one place and become the single source of truth about every project.

Scope of the implementation: one project management standard in one system

The implementation covered the entire organization. In three months, all ongoing projects were moved into FlexiProject: 51 undertakings of varying complexity. The system is now used by all employees and key subcontractors, 37 people in total, which the flexible license pool made straightforward to arrange. More importantly, the company treated the rollout as an opportunity to build a shared project management standard, not just to replace a tool.

Project charter and phase model

Every project now starts the same way: with a project charter that defines its goals, scope, and responsibilities, and with a phase model that structures the work from concept to handover. A uniform opening ritual may sound like a formality, but it removes the guesswork about what a properly set up project looks like and makes projects comparable across the portfolio.

Schedule templates and project baselines

Schedules are built on a common template using Gantt chart software, with task dependencies and milestones. Each plan is saved as a baseline: an approved reference point against which schedule and cost deviations are measured. Instead of a “living” plan that quietly shifts every week, managers work with a fixed commitment and visible variances.

Project budgets in sync with the ERP system

Employee time and money are the company’s two most valuable resources, so budget data had to stay consistent with the ERP system. FlexiProject was integrated with ERP so that information about the time and financial costs of projects flows between the systems without double entry, and the project budget software keeps figures in the project tool always matching the accounting records. The flexible structure allowed the company to go further and map its sales offers and warranty service processes in the system as well, right next to projects.

Adoption: why the team actually works in the system

The first driver was the attitude of the company’s CEO, who took on the role of an active project sponsor. He consistently repeated that all project information belongs in one system and required regular updates from every project manager. This seemingly simple mechanism decides whether a new tool becomes the actual work environment or just another place where data “should” be entered.

The second driver was a low entry barrier. Building a schedule and a budget turned out to be intuitive enough that every project manager, regardless of experience, started training by entering their own real project instead of practicing on artificial examples. The third was the ongoing support of the FlexiProject team, open to developing the system around the company’s needs: from mobile time tracking, through extending the scheduling module, to the ERP integration.

The company openly says the implementation is not finished. Employees keep suggesting improvements, and this steady stream of feedback is treated as proof of real, engaged usage rather than resistance to change.

Results of the implementation in an engineering company

Before the implementation, the company focused on costs already incurred. Today it continuously monitors budget variances for each project, including forecasted costs to completion. Managers and the board see where a project is heading before an overrun becomes a fact, with the approved baseline as the reference point.

The second new area is workload. Time spent on projects is analyzed per project and across the organization, and the utilization of resources by department, tracked in resource management software, has become an input to management decisions: which bids to pursue and when to start recruiting. Resource planning moved from intuition to real data on team availability.

The new standard is sustained by a steady rhythm of reviews run in project review software: every two weeks for projects in execution and monthly for projects in planning or of lower complexity. The material for these meetings comes directly from the system, not from manually prepared slides. The company also standardized the project charter, templates, baselines, a risk register, and report templates, and analyzes the distribution of projects in the portfolio against the company strategy.

Lessons for other engineering companies

A few lessons from this deployment travel well. First, adoption depends on a sponsor at board level: when the CEO requires the system to be the only source of project information, usage quickly becomes routine. Second, the tool should carry the standard rather than merely accompany it; the charter, phase model, baselines, and review rhythm were created together with the system, which is what makes them enforceable in daily work.

Third, integration with ERP removes double data entry and arguments about whose numbers are right. Fourth, a project management system implementation is not a project with an end date but a process of continuous improvement, in which user feedback is a sign of engagement. FlexiProject brings these elements together in project management software for engineering companies.

This implementation proves that a company of a few dozen people can build, within months, a standard of work that many larger organizations are still only planning. The key was not a lengthy pre-implementation analysis or a heavy transformation program, but consistency: all projects in one system, shared templates, a baseline as the reference point, and reviews based on data. For engineering companies, where every project directly shapes the financial result, this predictability has strategic weight. It allows the business to choose orders consciously, plan hiring ahead of demand, and discuss deadlines with clients in terms that are measurable rather than wishful. If your organization runs a dozen or several dozen projects in parallel and still relies on spreadsheets and solutions bolted onto ERP, implementing a dedicated project management system is likely the shortest path to regaining control over budgets, schedules, and resources.

You can see the full deployment with references in the Smart Automation case study. See other successful implementations in our case studies.