Project Management

Overview

Project Management generates a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) automatically from a BOM; it calculates the critical path with CPM (Critical Path Method), tracks progress through Gantt and Kanban views, and monitors SLAs per task. Every BOM line automatically becomes a procurement task; the engineering approval, assembly, quality control (FAI) and delivery phases are scheduled automatically from the BOM's lead times.

Key Concepts

• WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) — a project turns into a five-phase task tree derived automatically from the BOM lines: Engineering & Design Approval → Procurement for each BOM line → Assembly & Integration → Quality Control & FAI → Delivery & Acceptance.
• CPM (Critical Path Method) — a forward pass (early start/finish) and a backward pass (late start/finish) are calculated for every task; tasks with zero total float are on the critical path and their delays directly move the project finish date.
• Milestone — automatically generated milestones such as Project Start, Design Freeze, PPAP Submission, First Article (FAI) and Start of Series Production; their status is tracked as Planned/At Risk/Missed/Achieved/Waived.
• SLA breach/warning — tasks past their planned finish date are flagged as an "SLA breach", and tasks that have used 80% of their duration as an "SLA warning"; breaches are published to the notification event bus.
• Schedule variance — the difference, in days, between the actual finish date on the critical path and the planned project finish date.

Typical Workflow

1. Open Project Management from the left-hand menu and enter the project details on the New Project tab (customer, budget, project manager, planned start/finish).
2. Add the BOM lines (part number, description, supplier, lead time, criticality) and tick generate automatically from BOM — the system produces the WBS tasks and the milestone set.
3. On the Gantt Chart tab, follow the critical path, overall progress, schedule variance and SLA breach count.
4. On the Kanban tab, see and update tasks across the Not Started / In Progress / Blocked / Done columns.
5. On the Milestones tab, track milestone status (especially the customer-visible ones) and mark the achieved ones.
6. When updating a task, enter the progress percentage, the actual start/finish and a completion note — the system recalculates CPM and SLA status automatically.

Feature Reference

• Automatic WBS generation from the BOM (Engineering → Procurement → Assembly → Quality → Delivery phases)
• CPM calculation: early/late start-finish, total float, critical path marking
• Gantt data: task list, milestone list, summary KPIs (total/completed/in progress/blocked tasks, SLA breach/warning counts, number of tasks on the critical path)
• Kanban board: 4 status columns (Not Started, In Progress, Blocked, Done)
• Automatic milestone generation and achievement marking
• SLA breach/warning detection and notification event bus triggering
• Project status management (Planning → Active → Completed) and overall progress/schedule variance calculation
• Multi-task critical path chains through task dependencies

Constraints / Known Limits

• The demo data set ships with three example projects (one healthy, one troubled with SLA breaches, one not yet started); it is written to an in-memory store rather than a persistent production database.
• WBS generation is based on a fixed five-phase template; there is no configurable WBS template engine yet for bespoke/complex projects.
• Resource-based capacity planning and budget/spend (spent_usd) tracking are at a basic level; for a detailed cost breakdown see the Cost Simulation module.