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.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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4,000+

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1,512

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10 WD

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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