01CHALLENGE
What the project had to solve.
A manufacturer came to us with about 20 dissimilar projects in progress at the same time — warehouse steel structures, production lines, custom furniture, and exhibition stands. Every project had its own set of stages (design → procurement → cutting → welding → painting → assembly → quality control → logistics), deadlines, and owners.
Bitrix covered sales and deals, but production lived separately:
• stage deadlines were controlled manually — one overdue component could derail the whole project deadline, and nobody saw it in time;
• management had no overall picture — 20 projects at different stages with no consolidated view;
• a delay at one stage affected later stages and parallel projects (the same workshop or supplier), but the impact stayed invisible until it was too late;
• every new project was assembled from scratch in a spreadsheet, with typical stages entered manually.
They needed an extension above Bitrix that would take charge of production: see the portfolio, calculate the critical path, warn about cascading delays, and assemble a new project from templates.
02SOLUTION
What we built and why.
We designed the processes and built Karkas, a project-based manufacturing management system that sits above Bitrix.
What is inside (7 screens):
• Portfolio overview — all roughly 20 projects with progress and status (on time / at risk / overdue), breakdown by manager, and production-area workload. Separate views for management and managers.
• Project profile — a stages → tasks → subtasks tree plus a Gantt chart with the critical path and dependencies, showing which shifted stages move the deadline of the entire project.
• Project builder — a library of standard templates on the right; drag stages to the left, assign an owner and deadline, and add custom tasks. The system calculates duration and the final deadline as you work.
• Delays and cascade — for every delay, the chain of affected stages and connected projects (shared workshop / supplier) is visible with the shift in days, plus an automatic reminder to the owner.
• Team and roles — separate screens for the manager, sales manager, workshop lead, and assignee.
• Bitrix connection — a deal funnel and the bridge “deal won → manufacturing project created automatically” with stages, deadlines, and owners.
• Smart prompts, automatic deadline recalculation, and delay forecasting work in the background.
