Industry overview

Project management by industry:
which cut fits your projects

Five industry cuts are covered: mechanical and plant engineering, custom machine building, building and energy systems, construction and infrastructure, and development departments. This overview is not sorted by company size, but by how many steps a project is broken into in the plan and how much of that is carried by external trades or suppliers.

Linetrack scheduling and capacity planning for project-driven industrial companies across five industries

In short

Linetrack covers five industry cuts: mechanical and plant engineering, custom machine building, building and energy systems, construction and infrastructure, and development departments. What they share is that several projects run at once, the same specialist departments plan all of them, and a delay travels through the chain of dependent activities. What differs is how many steps the plan breaks a project into and how much of that is carried by external trades or suppliers. Which page fits is decided by the shape of the projects, not by company size.

Common ground

What all five industries share in planning terms

Three patterns appear on every one of the five industry pages - in different words, but with the same mechanics. They are why the same planning logic holds across all five cuts.

Several projects run at the same time

No company in these five industries runs exactly one project. Customer order, construction site or development programme: there are always several at once, and they interlock through the same people. How to steer them across all projects is covered on the page running several projects at once.

The same specialist departments plan all of them

Design, site management, assembly, software: a department belongs to no single project, all of them lay claim to it. Once a department is scheduled for one project, it is missing from the others at that moment. Separate project plans therefore cannot show where capacity is genuinely free.

A delay travels through the chain

All five industries have dependent activities: if one slips, everything behind it slips - not only inside its own project, but through the shared department into the next one as well. That only becomes visible when schedules and capacity are connected, see connected scheduling and capacity planning.

The cut

Why the same plan looks different five times

The mechanics are identical in all five industries. What differs is the cut: how many steps a project is broken into in the plan, and which of those steps sit outside your own company. Both are stated on the five industry pages; the overview below puts them side by side.

What sits in the same plan in each industry

On the left: the steps each industry page uses to break a project down. On the right: which of those steps come from outside. Four chains - and one bundle, because in development projects the work packages run alongside each other rather than one after another.

Mechanical and plant engineering
1. Design
2. Purchasing
3. Manufacturing
4. Assembly
5. Commissioning
6. Handover
suppliers on the critical pathMechanical and plant engineering: six steps named in the plan - design, purchasing, manufacturing, assembly, commissioning, handover. External in the plan: suppliers on the critical path.
Building and energy systems
1. Electrical design
2. Cabinet build
3. Programming
4. Installation
5. Commissioning
several external tradesBuilding and energy systems: five steps named in the plan - electrical design, cabinet build, programming, installation, commissioning. External in the plan: several external trades.
Custom machine building
1. Design
2. Manufacturing
3. Assembly
4. Commissioning
suppliers for one-off partsCustom machine building: four steps named in the plan - design, manufacturing, assembly, commissioning. External in the plan: suppliers for one-off parts.
Construction and infrastructure
1. Estimating
2. Site management
3. Work preparation
subcontractors per siteConstruction and infrastructure: three steps named in the plan - estimating, site management, work preparation. External in the plan: subcontractors per site.
Development departments
1. Mechanical
2. Electrical
3. Software
in parallel, not in sequence
no external trades namedDevelopment departments: three work packages running in parallel rather than a chain - mechanical, electrical, software. External in the plan: no external trades named.

What is counted are the steps each industry page names itself. What all five have in common is that the same specialist departments run several of these plans at once.

The further the external share sits to the right of the plan, the more the second point matters: trades, subcontractors and suppliers need their own access, limited to their part of the plan. How that is set up is shown on the page bringing suppliers into projects.

Where to start

Which industry page fits you?

Each of the five pages describes the same platform against a different project shape. If two pages seem equally close, take the one whose sequence is nearer to your own plan - the mechanics behind them are the same either way.

Mechanical and plant engineering

What is specific

There is no single place where the work happens. A project is spread across internal departments, the customer and the entire supply chain - from design to documented handover.

What the plan hinges on

Long project durations, design engineers and fitters shared across projects, and purchased parts sitting on the critical path.

Project Management for Mechanical & Plant Engineering

Custom machine building

What is specific

One-off engineering: every machine is designed once, for one customer. Templates and standard plans only get you so far; the project-specific remainder is planned from scratch every time.

What the plan hinges on

The fixed chain of design, manufacturing, assembly and commissioning - and the same specialists working on several customer orders at once.

Project Management for Custom Machine Building

Building and energy systems

What is specific

No project runs like the last one: alongside design and manufacturing sit electrical design, cabinet build, PLC programming, visualisation and commissioning - plus external trades with their own lead times running into the same internal departments.

What the plan hinges on

The fact that a slip travels through the chain of downstream phases all the way to commissioning - and that the project lead usually comes out of one of the technical departments.

Project Management for Building & Energy Systems

Construction and infrastructure

What is specific

Several sites run at once, and the same estimating, site management and work preparation staff plan all of them.

What the plan hinges on

The fact that a department scheduled for one site is missing from the others at that moment - plus several subcontractors on each site's schedule.

Project Steering for Mid-Sized Construction Companies

Development departments

What is specific

Mechanical, electrical and software engineering work on the same product in parallel rather than in sequence - with a fixed project end instead of a handover into series production.

What the plan hinges on

The mutual dependencies between work packages: if mechanical design slips, electrical integration and then software testing move with it.

Project Management for Development Departments

Honest boundaries

Where Linetrack reaches its limits in all five industries

These four points appear in the same words on several of the five industry pages. They do not change with the industry:

No automatic resource levelling. Linetrack calculates dependency relationships, derives the critical path and highlights it in the bar chart. It does not resolve an overload by itself: the capacity histogram shows the bottleneck, the department does the replanning.
No time tracking. Actual hours arrive through an interface from the system that already holds them. Linetrack does not record working time.
Not a replacement for ERP, CAD or PLM. Master data, purchase orders and invoicing stay in the ERP; design data, bills of material and drawings stay in CAD and PLM. Linetrack plans schedules and capacity across them.
No claims management. The critical path is marked in the bar chart - the retrospective delay and variation analysis needed for contractual evidence is not something Linetrack provides.

Schedule with dependencies across several departments in Linetrack

Fit depends less on the industry than on the structure: Linetrack makes the biggest difference in companies between 20 and 300 employees with up to more than 30 departments - and that is not a hard ceiling, considerably larger organisations run it in production too. It is a weaker fit where there is no cross-departmental coordination at all – a single trade, say, or pure series production without project character. How Linetrack sits alongside existing systems is shown in the overview of interfaces and integrations.

Context

Where the figures on these pages come from

All five industry pages carry the same figures, and there is a reason for that: they are collected across all industries, not per industry. Linetrack currently steers 1,512 industrial projects running in parallel, has supported over 4,000 completed industrial projects, 91 % of customers named Excel and tool chaos as the problem they started from, and the median time to the first self-planned project is 10 working days.

What does not follow from this is any industry-specific claim. For construction and infrastructure, for development departments and for custom machine building there are no separate figures - and those three pages say so. Individual segments are backed by named customers rather than by figures: the STOLL Group, Prola Automation, GRÜBL Automatisierungstechnik and InVENTer for building, energy and automation systems, Schnaithmann for automation technology with its own mechanical, electrical and software development.

If you want to know which customers stand behind Linetrack by name, they are collected in one place: the public reference customers of Linetrack and their success stories.

*The figures on this page come from a full survey of all productive Linetrack implementations across all industries, as of August 2026. Multiple answers were possible.

Collaborative planning in Linetrack: several specialist departments maintain their own part of the same project plan

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Still have questions?

Book a slot with our team.

How are the five industry pages cut - by company size or by project structure?

By project structure. What matters is how many steps a project is broken into in the plan, whether those steps run in sequence or in parallel, and how much of it is carried by external trades, subcontractors or suppliers. Company size only matters insofar as there have to be several specialist departments sharing capacity. A small custom machine builder and a large plant engineering firm therefore end up on different pages, even though both build machines.

My industry is not listed - does Linetrack still fit?

Possibly. The five pages are examples of a structure, not a closed list. Three conditions decide it: several projects run at the same time, the same specialist departments work on more than one of them, and activities depend on each other closely enough that a slip moves downstream dates. If all three hold, the closest of the five pages is the right entry point, even if the industry label does not match.

What separates mechanical engineering from construction in planning terms?

Mainly the place where the work happens. In construction, the site is a shared location where the trades come together, and several sites are planned at once by the same estimating, site management and work preparation staff. In mechanical and plant engineering a project is spread across internal departments, the customer and the supply chain, and the plan names six steps from design to handover rather than three. The shared department and the travelling delay are the same in both cases.

How many departments does a company need for Linetrack to pay off?

It takes several specialist departments that share capacity across projects - there is no fixed minimum. In practice Linetrack makes the biggest difference in companies between 20 and 300 employees with up to more than 30 departments, and that is not a hard ceiling. Where there is no cross-departmental coordination at all – a single trade, for instance – the approach has little to play to.

Are there reference customers per industry?

Not for every one of the five. For building, energy and automation systems, the STOLL Group, Prola Automation, GRÜBL Automatisierungstechnik and InVENTer are publicly named customers; for automation technology with in-house development, Schnaithmann. For construction and infrastructure there is so far no publicly named reference customer specific to that segment, and for development departments no separately collected figure. All customers released by name are collected among the public reference customers of Linetrack.

What changes about the product per industry - are there industry editions?

No. The mechanism is the same as in any other industrial project at Linetrack: one shared data basis for schedules and capacity, calculated dependency relationships, a visible critical path, and specialist departments and externally onboarded parties maintaining their own part. What differs is only the cut of the plans - how many steps they name, whether those steps sit in sequence or in parallel, and which of them come from outside. There are no separate industry editions and no industry-dependent feature scope.

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