New Project Management at Hack Formenbau
Hack Formenbau is an injection molding company that specializes in the development and manufacture of high-quality molds. With 180 employees, the company develops precision molds in the areas of single-component, multi-component and multi-cavity at its Kirchheim unter Teck site.
Before the introduction of the new software, project management at Hack Formenbau was based on a combination of various MS Office documents such as Word and Excel as well as an ERP system called Workplan. This fragmented approach led to challenges in the overview and management of projects, particularly in the planning and tracking of deadlines, milestones, resources and costs.
The company’s basic requirements for new project management software included:
- Overviews of the approximately 150 ongoing projects
- Management of deadlines including milestones (planned and actual data)
- Detailed project phases and cost control
- Resource planning, especially for non-manufacturing areas
- Visualization of the production areas
- Creation of status reports: quick and easy to create from a standardized database
- Integration of existing data from the ERP system
- Creation of schedules based on templates with project phases and adoption of data from production planning


Using PLANTA since 2023
Choosing and Customizing the Project Software
After a thorough comparison of the company’s requirements with established systems on the market, it became clear that the PLANTA software offered a large overlap with the required functions and evaluations. In addition, the flexibility of PLANTA project enabled customization to meet the customer’s specific needs.
Implementation of the Project Management Functions
Overviews and Visualizations
The software provides detailed overviews of project phases and milestones. A particular focus was on visualizing the production processes of individual projects and on ranking delays to the baseline.
Resource Planning
A central feature of PLANTA project is the pool for new projects that are still without assignment. This makes it possible to see which projects have not yet been assigned to a design engineer, for example. A detailed list of all employees and their assigned projects provides an overview of who should have completed a project by what time and should thus be available for the next one.
Status Reports
The creation of status reports has been automated, with header and baseline data, master milestones, milestone trend analysis, cost statuses and payment schedules being filled in automatically. Manual entries include the current status, next steps and changes to the objectives. These reports are regularly presented to the steering committee by the respective project managers.
Schedules
The creation of schedules is based on templates that are available in German and English, where phases and master milestones are defined. However, milestones and processes can be customized. There are also special customer schedules with legends in German or English as well as program schedules.
Positive Impact
The introduction of the new software system has improved the customer’s project management. They can now manage data centrally and display them transparently: Schedules including milestones, project overviews, resource plans, status reports and utilization overviews. The data from the ERP system can be integrated into PLANTA, and the standardized database ensures greater transparency. The visualization of production processes and automated status reports contribute to improved decision-making.
Outlook
The flexible suite made it possible to implement the necessary adjustments with moderate effort. Adapting the software to the changing needs of the company will remain a key task in the future, as will employee training. Overall, the introduction of the tool shows how important a well thought-out and flexibly adaptable project management software is for the success of a company in the specialized mold making sector.