n terms of the project side of the business, Inarca SpA manages many projects during one working year. Projects typically include the manufacturing of any of the following types of products: custom or standard made products or machines, as well as the introduction of new products to the market. The company focuses both on quality and on innovation, with an ambitious target of 0 defects and reinvesting 10% of their turnover into new products and technologies.
Inarca SpA reached out to us in early 2020 because the standard jobs module of Microsoft Dynamics NAV was limiting their capability to manage, control and overlook all of their projects. In general, they found it difficult working with 7 different departments in terms of resourcing for around 100 big projects per year. This meant that a total of 2500 job tasks needed to be managed.
For Inarca it is very crucial to take into consideration their resource’s capacity and scheduled machine maintenance. Both are important factors that determine a smooth and timely execution of their projects. However, while working with standard Dynamics NAV, they lacked transparency especially due to the high number of resources being distributed across multiple departments.
Cristian Coianiz, Project Manager at Inarca SpA, describes the situation before using the Visual Jobs Scheduler as follows: “In terms of planning, in the past we were simply checking delivery dates and looking out for priority projects without any visualization whatsoever. This created issues in terms of knowing how busy certain departments and resources were. Everything was based on our gut feel, which at the end of the day was simply a broad estimate. Since everything was subjective, I was convinced that this was a weakness in terms of our planning”.
Inarca analyzed the status quo and created a list of requirements for a new project and resource scheduling tool:
Based on the list of requirements, Inarca searched for an appropriate solution and found the Visual Jobs Scheduler. In addition to this, they not just bought the product, but also the so called “Quick Start Package”. This is a fixed-price implementation and consulting offer from NETRONIC which makes sure that customers gain the biggest value of their respective visual scheduler.
Now that Inarca has been working with the VJS for almost one year, Christian summarizes its benefits for his company:
Better understanding of resource capacity - "It serves as a good visualization tool of our data and helps our team understand what is really going on, by having a dashboard of our current workload."
Right now, we continue to work closely and support Inarca with the VJS. When asked about our working relationship, Cristian mentioned, “We continue to use the product and adapt it little by little to our daily needs. It is also a big plus that the cooperation regarding any issues with the VJS has been dealt with quickly by the NETRONIC team. They are always very responsive and have a wealth of experience and best practices when it comes to visual project and resource planning with Dynamics NAV.
