Industrial Automation
Giving an industrial automation engineering company a forward view of its people, costs and purchases
CONTEXT
Our customer is an engineering company of around forty people that designs and delivers industrial automation projects: mechanical engineering, electrical and instrumentation, PLC programming and automated guided vehicles. It runs 10 to 20 customer projects in parallel, some lasting up to 18 months. Its ERP, Odoo, was already well adopted and reliably recorded what had happened: hours, purchases, expenses, invoicing, approved budgets and holidays. What the company wanted next was a clear view of what was coming: which people would be needed, when, and what each project would cost by the time it was finished.
KEY CHALLENGES
Moving from tracking actuals to anticipating needs
The ERP answered the question « where are we? » very well. The question « where are we heading? » was answered in Excel extracts, where forecasts of remaining hours and expenses were added by hand, one project at a time. The goal was to turn this individual effort into a shared, repeatable forecasting routine, without changing what already worked in the ERP.
Linking project estimates to the people who do the work
Project managers estimated effort per task. Team leaders assigned engineers, each with their own spreadsheet. The two views were not connected. A project manager could believe enough engineers were on a task when they were not, or a team leader could put more people on a task than the estimate allowed, with a direct effect on margin. Team leaders wanted to see, week by week and per discipline, the hours needed against the hours scheduled, so they could put the right person on the right task at the right time.
Seeing the whole portfolio, not one project at a time
Reporting from the ERP was built project by project and required manual extraction. Management and cost control wanted a consolidated view across all projects: progress, forecast costs, purchases still to make and expected overruns.
01
CLIENT
Engineering company
02
Industry
Industrial Automation
03
Organization Size
Emerging and SMB (1-199 employees)
What we did
Approach
Mapping how projects really run. Interviews and an on-site workshop with project managers, team leaders, cost control and administration to map the actual flow of a project, from business proposal to closure, and to agree who does what at each step.
A clear split between the two systems. Before configuring anything, we agreed which system owns which data (see the table below). The ERP was kept exactly as it was; the planning layer was built around it.
A forecasting routine in two horizons. Resource needs are first planned by function (for example « PLC engineer »), confirmed 4 to 6 weeks ahead, then assigned to named engineers 2 to 4 weeks before the work starts, taking the holidays recorded in the ERP into account.
One project blueprint for every project. A standard set of Smartsheet sheets, reports and dashboards (plan, budget, team, bill of materials, risks and decisions log, weekly update) created in the same way for each new project, with Smartsheet Resource Management configured around the teams and disciplines.
Designing the link with the ERP. We documented and validated the data exchanges (timesheets, holidays, purchase orders, expenses, invoices): scope, direction, frequency and governance rules. The customer chose a specialised integration partner to build the technical connection on the basis of this design.
Keeping it maintainable. With more than 78,000 timesheet lines in the ERP, hours are brought into the planning layer per project and budget task rather than line by line. Forecasting gets exactly the level of detail it needs, the detail stays in the ERP, and no extra licence is required.
Training and handover. On-site training sessions for administration, cost control, project managers, team leaders and the operations manager, each focused on that role’s part of the routine, so the teams can run and evolve the solution themselves.
OUTCOME
A forecast budget per project. On one sheet, per budget task: the approved budget, the actuals coming from the ERP, the hours still to spend taken from the planning, the materials still to buy, the estimated cost at completion and an overrun or underrun indicator.
A Team Leader dashboard and planning views per discipline. Forecast resource needs across all projects, the tasks still to be confirmed, and resource utilisation, so allocation decisions are made on the same data the project managers use.
A validated interface design and an interim routine run by the customer’s team. A documented exchange design ready for the integration partner, plus a step-by-step guide and video for a weekly refresh of ERP actuals. The customer’s team has been running this refresh on its own since go-live, so forecasts work on current figures before the automation is live.
A portfolio summary and dashboard. Project information and key figures roll up automatically from each project, without manual extraction.
Project managers, team leaders and cost control now look at the same forecast: who is needed, when, and what each project will cost by the end. The ERP keeps doing what it does well, and the planning layer adds the forward view the teams were asking for.
PLATFORM
Built on Smartsheet, alongside the existing ERP. The planning and forecasting environment described above was designed and delivered in Smartsheet. That covers the project blueprint, budget and forecast sheets, the team leader and portfolio dashboards, and the reports, using Smartsheet’s cross-sheet links, automations, reports and dashboards. Resource allocation and capacity views run on Smartsheet Resource Management. Odoo remains the system of record for actuals, and Smartsheet reads those figures rather than duplicating them.
Why Smartsheet. Smartsheet is a work and project management platform for planning, automating and reporting on work, all from a familiar spreadsheet-like interface. Here it was chosen after the process mapping, because it could add what the ERP didn’t provide: one shared forward view of people, costs and purchases. It does this without replacing a system the teams already used well, and without heavy custom development. Its resource management module lets team leaders compare forecast needs with actual availability across every project. The same setup can grow from one project to the full portfolio as new projects start.