Project management software for the automotive industry

To ensure that all components are available at the right time in tight product development cycles in the automotive industry, it is not only the internal organization that is crucial, but also the complex network of relationships with various 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. In addition to classic project management standards (waterfall model, GPM/IPMA, PMI, V-model PRINCE2), BCS supports agile and hybrid methods as well as industry-specific standards, including Automotive SPICE. Once you have created a project, you can save it as a template and use it as a standard for future planning.
	You can 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, your 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, including function, skills, areas of responsibility, departmental affiliation, working time model, payroll information and vacation management, is stored in digital personnel files and made available for resource planning.
	You also record your assets, means of production and inventory items in BCS, link them to associated contracts and documents and can thus schedule them 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 through to corporate design by means of high-level customizing options.

Efficient communication processes and the immediate availability of all relevant information are the keys to keeping your development and production costs as low as possible 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 in all phases of the project lifecycle - no matter which method or standard you use to plan and implement your projects. In addition to classic methods such as PRINCE2, GPM/IPMA or PMI and agile methods such as Scrum, BCS also offers all the necessary tools, functions and wizards to apply hybrid project management methods and industry-specific standards such as Automotive SPICE. Thanks to its high flexibility and maximum customizability, you can also have appropriate configurations made to meet your own project management requirements. With BCS, you can thus map your individual project management guide.

With informative overviews of timelines and deployment plans, you can efficiently handle research and development projects as well as investment projects in the automotive industry in Projektron BCS. Projektron BCS supports project managers right from the initiation and planning of the project through to controlling and completion.

With the lean project portfolio management (PPM) of Projektron BCS, you generate project proposals from project ideas and compare them. With the PPM tool in Projektron BCS, you also compile portfolios for different focal points and decide which projects you actually want to implement.

In multi-project controlling, BCS helps you with the multi-project board to keep a constant eye on all projects with their current status and resource utilization. With Projektron BCS, managers have an overview of all the projects relevant to them, their most important key figures, and any missed deadlines. Thus, the cross-project evaluations not only show planned and actual values, but also the remaining effort estimated by the individual project teams.

All efforts are documented by the project team on an ongoing basis and directly on the project and are available for invoicing at any time.

Product management with BCS

You manage products in a hierarchical structure of product structure elements in the Products workspace in Projektron BCS. The hierarchical structure can be as deep as you like. The graphical network diagram in Projektron BCS provides an overview of related products, with blue arrows symbolizing a predecessor-successor relationship and gray arrows representing the hierarchy. In addition, it is possible to display your own relations. By clicking on a product, it can be viewed in more detail. The predecessor-successor relationship is displayed even more clearly.

Transparent performance: Reports

When collaborating with external stakeholders, your automotive company benefits from the customizable reports you can create in Projektron BCS: A project preparation report, for example, creates a common project understanding, while effort reports on projects and tickets increase transparency and ensure the trust of all project participants and stakeholders.

Want reports tailored exactly to your organization? Thanks to the interface to the open source report designer BIRT, you can design completely individual reports. Do you want to provide regular reports to different stakeholders? You can do this efficiently using report orders with an integrated e-mail function: In the ergonomic wizard, you create all the necessary information about the report, output interval and recipient once, and Projektron BCS takes care of everything else for you automatically.

Runs by itself and always better: Automate and optimize processes

With the BPMN process designer, Projektron BCS offers your automotive company the possibility to model your individual sales processes, consulting processes and any other 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 within your company in the automotive industry 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 you not only to design and model processes within Projektron BCS, but also to execute, monitor, document, evaluate and optimize them. Projektron BCS thus supports your business process management and automates the execution of frequently repeated business processes and workflows. Every employee knows immediately when and by when they have to do exactly what and to which goal they are contributing.

Quality management: sources of error dry up

Projektron BCS supports you in checking your quality management measures with a wide range of evaluation options. If you use the ticket system from Projektron BCS, you can easily gain important information for your quality management - for example, about frequent product errors.

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 testing 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.

With the web-based project management software Projektron BCS, your development or production teams can work together efficiently at different locations. Thanks to integrated collaboration tools and central access to projects and documents, you unite all project participants on one platform. Projektron BCS is also ideally equipped for international collaboration. The system supports multiple languages and currencies, so 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. Even your supplier in China can communicate in Chinese and bill in Chinese Yuan, which is automatically converted by BCS. A total of ten different language versions are available in Projektron BCS.

Your employees can easily access Projektron BCS from anywhere via a web browser. However, not only your internal teams, 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 their location and keep track of tasks, deadlines and dates.

By integrating your customers, you create transparency. Your customers are not only informed about the current status of the project work, but also about resources, efforts and costs. Approval processes can be accelerated through direct communication via BCS. Trustful teamwork as well as time and cost savings have a positive effect 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.

On a ticket, you can not only document their entire communication process and attach documents necessary for processing a task, but also directly record the processing effort.

Tickets for Scrum

If you work with the ticket system from Projektron BCS, you can easily transfer internal inquiries and customer requests for your products into your Scrum projects.

For example, if a customer requests a new function via ticket, you can create the associated user story in the Scrum software with just a few clicks and add it to a product backlog. The ticket description can be easily adopted for user stories and activities. Projektron BCS links the new user story to the original ticket, making it easy to trace the background of its creation, for example when prioritizing the product backlog.

In addition, tickets can be linked to existing user stories, epics or partial requirements.