Project management software in mechanical and plant engineering

To ensure that all components are available at the right time in tightly timed product development cycles in mechanical engineering, it is not only the internal organization that is crucial, but above all the complex network of relationships with a network of different suppliers and customers. With Projektron BCS, you make all information available centrally and up-to-date for all stakeholders by creating a perfect image of your internal organization and your external relationships and making any information available at the right place.

	You plan your projects in Projektron BCS according to your individual project management guidelines. BCS supports agile and hybrid methods in addition to classic project management standards (waterfall model, GPM/IPMA, PMI, V model PRINCE2). Once you have created a project, you can save it as a template and use it as a standard for future planning.
	You map your processes in BCS with integrated workflows and checklists or with the BPMN module for business process modeling. You can flexibly define and automate processes for all your project and business activities, for example complex inspection processes, production processes, invoice works, procurement and purchasing processes or even approval processes for vacation requests, etc. BCS informs each person responsible for a process step what they have to do and by when.
	You manage your customers, suppliers, service providers and contacts centrally with the CRM function of Projektron BCS. Once created, the communication history for each stakeholder is stored here, and contracts, offers, invoices, documents, data on joint projects and appointments are linked to the respective person or higher-level organization and made centrally accessible.
	Your internal organization is completely mirrored in BCS, both the organizational structure of your company with all locations and the project organization. Employee information is stored in digital personnel files with function, skills, areas of responsibility, departmental affiliation, working time model, payroll information and vacation management and made available for resource planning.
	Your assets, means of production, machines and other inventory items are also recorded in BCS, linked to associated contracts and documents and can thus be scheduled as material resources in projects.
	You centralize your communication with Projektron BCS. Every process is imported into BCS via mail import and CTI interface. With project tickets, you assign concrete tasks and collaborate across locations worldwide thanks to multi-language capability. The entire communication of ticket agents and representatives as well as the recording of working hours on tickets goes into the superordinate project. For planning your external project communication, the full functionalities of tasks, tickets, workflows with checklists and deadlines are available in BCS. This allows you to plan project communication as an integral part of the entire project right from the start. Via guest licenses, which can be flexibly defined by means of detailed rights assignment, you can include external stakeholders and offer them direct insight into the project progress or even grant them co-determination rights regarding certain views and aspects.
	You upload your documents directly to tasks or deadlines. Documents are stored in a uniform filing structure so that they can be found again. Authorized employees always have access to relevant information from anywhere. Team collaboration is facilitated because all members have access to the latest document version and changes are traceable. There are no more duplicates or outdated versions of documents. Search and filter functions facilitate knowledge transfer and research.
	Not only do you organize and manage your contracts in BCS, but you get a powerful tool for your entire contract lifecycle management (CLM). Link your contracts to people, organizations, tasks, workflows, project groups, projects, items in your inventory, offers, invoices or other contracts, or integrate them easily into work and approval processes. Use the integrated contract generator to create new contracts according to your individual requirements.
	Projektron BCS can meet your individual requirements for the scope of functions, mapping of your business logic and corporate language up to the corporate design by means of high-level customizing options.

Efficient communication processes and the immediate availability of all relevant information and materials are the keys to keeping development and production costs as low as possible in your mechanical engineering company and reliably meeting deadlines in your product development cycles. Projektron BCS is your central platform on which all this information flows together and is intelligently networked.

Projektron BCS supports you throughout the entire project lifecycle, regardless of the method or standard used. In addition to classic methods such as PRINCE2, GPM/IPMA or PMI and agile methods such as Scrum, BCS also offers all the tools, functions and wizards required to apply hybrid project management methods and industry-specific standards such as Automotive SPICE.

In plant engineering, where projects are often very extensive and complex because they involve many trades and technical disciplines, BCS supports you with high flexibility and maximum adaptability to map your individual project management requirements.

With the help of BCS you can get informative schedule and deployment plan overviews for research, development, investment projects in mechanical and plant engineering. BCS supports project managers in all phases of the project, from initiation and planning to controlling and closing. You can generate project proposals from ideas, compare them and use BCS' PPM tool to compile project portfolios on different focal points to decide which projects to implement.

BCS' multi-project controlling helps you keep track of all projects with their current status and resource utilization. With project-specific and cross-project evaluations, you can analyze not only planned and actual values, but also the remaining effort estimated by the individual project teams.

The project team documents all efforts continuously and directly on the project and makes them available for invoicing at any time.

Projektron BCS, a web-based project management software, enables your company's development or production teams in mechanical or plant engineering to work together efficiently, regardless of location. The software offers integrated collaboration tools and central access to projects and documents, enabling all project participants to be connected on one platform. International collaboration is possible without barriers, as the system supports multiple languages and currencies. For example, your German site can work in German and bill in euros, while your development service provider in Budapest can use the Hungarian user interface and currency. Your supplier in China can even communicate in Chinese and invoice in Chinese Yuan, which is automatically converted by BCS. A total of ten different language versions are available in Projektron BCS.

Your employees can access Projektron BCS from anywhere by simply using a web browser. Not only your internal teams from different development and production sites, but also your customers and external project staff can be actively involved, thanks to browser-based access, a suitable license structure and detailed rights management. Project participants with the appropriate rights can access the same central database regardless of location and keep an eye on tasks, deadlines and schedules.

The integration of your customers creates transparency and informs them about the current status of the project work as well as resources, efforts and costs. Approval processes can be accelerated through direct communication via BCS, which leads to trusting teamwork as well as time and cost savings and has a positive impact on all parties involved.

Ticket system in BCS - Versatile for task assignment and external communication

The ticket system in Projektron BCS opens up several options at once:

	Customer communication and communication with external service providers and project participants.
	Internal task allocation and work organization within the scope of project tasks and line activities (Kanban board)
	Flexible task- and project-related effort recording for precise billing
	Exchange and documentation of communication within the scope of collaboration (also across locations)
	Change management via open items and tickets in which you escalate releases and changes directly to the steering committee.

Not only can you document your entire communication process on a ticket and attach documents required for processing a task, but you can also directly record the processing effort.

Quality management: Sources of errors dry up

Projektron BCS supports you in checking your quality management measures with a wide range of evaluation options. By using the ticket system from Projektron BCS, you can easily gain important information for your quality management, such as identifying frequent product defects.

Thought of everything? With standardized checklists, you map known error sources and support your employees in efficiently improving quality. Projects, tasks, workflow steps and milestones: In Projektron BCS, you benefit from the proven inspection method at numerous points.

Whether in tasks, workflows or projects - you can save your valuable experience quickly and easily in the appropriate comments fields for future work. The course of the project can be efficiently documented in Projektron BCS. This allows you to contribute to well-founded process analyses already during the project work and to promote continuous quality improvement.

Product management with BCS

In Projektron BCS, you organize your products in the "Products" workspace in a hierarchical structure of product structure elements. This hierarchy can be as deep as you like and is visualized by a graphical network diagram. Related products are shown by predecessor-successor relations and with hierarchies. You can also represent your own relations. A click on a product allows a detailed view, where the predecessor-successor relations are even more clearly visible.

When working with external business partners, your mechanical engineering company benefits from the customizable reports you can create in Projektron BCS: A project preparation report, for example, creates a common project understanding, effort reports on projects and tickets increase transparency and secure the trust of your clients and customers.

Would you like reports that are precisely tailored to your company? Thanks to the interface to the open source report designer BIRT, you can design completely individual reports. You want to provide your customers with regular reports? You can create project status reports with statements on the current production status, the stability and quality of the project results, risk assessment and deviations from the original planning at the push of a button using the reporting function in BCS. You can do this efficiently using report orders with an integrated e-mail function: In the ergonomic wizard, you create all the required information on the report, output interval and recipient once, and Projektron BCS takes care of everything else for you automatically.

With the BPMN process designer, Projektron BCS offers your company in plant engineering or mechanical engineering the possibility to model your individual production, sales and business processes. As an internationally recognized notation standard, BPMN is a central component of business process management and enables you to visualize and optimize your business processes and workflows. Furthermore, it creates more transparency about the processes within your company and towards potential customers.

BPMN processes enable you to assign tasks in a transparent and clearly defined manner in teamwork and in collaboration across departmental boundaries, hierarchical levels and locations.

Typical application cases and use cases for BPMN processes are:

complex verification processes

invoicing workflows

procurement processes/purchasing processes

approval processes with approval workflow (vacation request, request for business trip, home office, time off compensation, expense reimbursement, etc.)

The BPMN Designer enables the design, modeling, execution, monitoring, documentation, evaluation and optimization of processes within Projektron BCS. This supports business process management and automates the execution of frequently repeated business processes and workflows. Every employee has an immediate overview of exactly what they have to do, when and by when, and to which goal they are contributing.