28 August 2024

Customer Spotlight – Spectades

About Spectades Spectades is a Hexagon Alliance partner and provides consultancy services, training courses, and additional products for the successful […]

About Spectades

Spectades is a Hexagon Alliance partner and provides consultancy services, training courses, and additional products for the successful implementation and optimization of HxGN EAM.
Spectades is your Asset Management partner and has over 25 years of experience in maintenance, project and program management, calibration, business development, and service management.

We develop and supply various plug-ins and options that allow you to expand the functionality of HxGN EAM. The experienced Spectades Service Desk team helps customers with their daily EAM work and can also provide a complete management organization. Our team of 20+ specialists and our many successful implementations make us the #1 HxGN EAM Alliance partner in Europe.

Visit the website of Spectades to learn more about the software solutions, training courses, and support services for HxGN EAM: https://www.spectades.com/en/

About me

My name is Maurice Lapré and my role at Spectades is Consultant/Support Manager. I’m also a senior developer for the plug-in “Spectades Planning Suite” which utilizes the Bryntum Gantt product.

Planning/Scheduling of maintenance Work Orders and assigning employees

The HxGN EAM application has base modules for planning/scheduling of Work Orders and employees but lacks a good overview of the outstanding work on a timeline-based view. That’s what a lot of our customers expressed a couple of years ago. In close collaboration with a delegation of those customers, we decided to develop a plug-in called “Spectades Planning Suite” to fill that gap. The main requirements were that it should provide a good overview of the outstanding work on a timeline/Gantt chart form and it should be easy to (re)schedule work and assign employees to it.

After a couple of years, we ran into limitations of the Javascript framework we were using at that time, which was DHTMLX Gantt. The User Interface felt out-of-date and it wasn’t able to handle big data without feeling sluggish. These were some of the changes we needed to make to stay competitive and avoid disappointing our current and potential customers. That’s when we decided to look for an alternative, which we found in Bryntum Gantt. The User Interface was modern and fresh-looking and big data didn’t seem a problem at all. It supported even more features which we saw the potential to utilize in future releases of our plug-in.

The migration from DHTMLX to Bryntum, of course, required some adjustments—for example, in how we were populating the framework’s data model. In the end, the effort wasn’t that much due to good Bryntum Gantt API documentation and an active Bryntum Support Forum.

Bryntum Gantt in Spectades Planning Suites

The Spectades Planning Suite is a plug-in that works directly in the customer’s EAM environment. There’s no need to set up extra servers and/or databases and to create new interfaces. Data is fetched from and written back to EAM directly via existing EAM XMLhttp or web service REST API’s.

What our end-users think

Our end-users liked the new look & feel and improved responsiveness when we switched over to Bryntum Gantt. It has a more clean and modern look. We can now also develop more feature requests due to a more extensive framework, which in turn makes our customers happy.

Summing up

We’re happy with the support Bryntum provides, not only on the technical side but also on e.g. the commercial side. They are also willing to receive our input to develop a long-requested feature, which is time-based assignments. This will create the ability to assign resources to just a part of the task instead of the complete (duration of the) task.