Why EDAG Chose Ganttic as Their Equipment Planning Software

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Overview

EDAG Group is one of the world’s largest independent engineering service providers. At their Accredited Test Center (ATC) in Fulda, managing thousands of hours of highly technical tests requires absolute precision. Their workflows revolve around equipment availability rather than headcount. That is why EDAG chose Ganttic for their equipment planning, as the software allows them to use Resources for equipment as well. Moving away from rigid spreadsheets and unintuitive software gave the team visual clarity, cut planning time by at least 25 percent, and let them build a system shaped around how their test center actually works. 

About EDAG Group and the Fulda Test Center

Founded in 1969, EDAG Group is a global engineering service provider with deep roots in vehicle development, production engineering, and smart factory solutions. A significant portion of their work involves rigorous physical testing: before any component goes into a commercial vehicle or mobile tool, it has to survive extreme stress, wear, and environmental trials.

This testing happens at facilities like the EDAG Accredited Test Center (ATC) in Fulda, Germany. Spanning over 4,000 square meters of testing space, the site covers environmental weathering simulation, electronics testing, physical-chemical methods, fatigue strength evaluations, component testing, and the development of new test benches. These are the physical trials that help confirm safety and compliance for clients across the automotive, aerospace, and rail sectors.

Source: EDAG Group 

Scheduling industry-specific equipment at the Fulda ATC

We recently visited the Fulda site to learn more about the testing operations firsthand. We spoke with Daniel Julean-Schwab, Lead Test Innovator and Daniel Ton, Test Engineer at EDAG, about how their daily planning works.

We don’t plan people but only our equipment in Fulda.

In a facility this size, keeping track of testing components, equipment usage, and timeframes could easily spiral out of control. Plus, EDAG’s planning approach looks nothing like a standard corporate environment: they don’t plan people. Projects go to teams who manage various tests, so the human workload sorts itself out based on what each project needs.

Source: EDAG Group 

The main focus for the EDAG Fulda site is to schedule the industry- and test-specific equipment and plan testing processes safely and accurately. 

The Fulda site plans its physical resources, like climate chambers, shakers, and specialized testing benches that all come with different goals and processes, thus requiring precise planning. For example, a climate chamber might be booked for a continuous 2,000-hour environmental test, while a shaker running bio-mechanical stress tests needs precise, task-by-task scheduling.

Accredited Test Center (ATC) in Fulda

Choosing Ganttic as their equipment planning software

Before Ganttic, the EDAG team relied on Excel, entering dates, notes, and required hours into a spreadsheet. But visualizing a 2,000-hour test inside a grid of cells turned out to be practically impossible.

“You think you can use a spreadsheet, but you also easily get lost,” Daniel Ton told us. 

“Finding a project in Excel is a real problem,” adds Daniel Julean-Schwab. Spreadsheets were creating blind spots, so the team tried a different scheduling tool next. It turned out to be overly complicated and unintuitive, requiring excessive clicks just to schedule a single item. 

“Switching to a different view shouldn’t take 300 clicks!” says Daniel Ton. In addition to that, it was project-focused, forcing one row per task, a structure that couldn’t accommodate EDAG’s resource-first approach to equipment scheduling. What EDAG needed was flexible equipment scheduling software where the equipment dictated the timeline. 

What made Ganttic pass the test

Ganttic helped us save 25% of time.

For an engineering team running such exacting processes, the tool also had to be intuitive.

Asked what made Ganttic pass the test, Daniel Julean-Schwab pointed to ease of use and visibility into their equipment as resources as the deciding factors:

• Drag-and-Drop interface: With a simple drag-and-drop interface, all the necessary information became visible at a glance. Even with the complexity of their testing cycles, it was easy for the entire team to schedule equipment.
• Saving 25% of time: For EDAG, visual scheduling brings clarity to a genuinely complicated environment. That clarity isn’t just convenient; it’s a matter of accuracy and safety. 

In the testing industry, miscalculating equipment availability or running tests out of sequence can set a project back by months. Centralizing projects and resources in one place means finding a project now takes a single click.

Compared to digging through folders or scrolling through a sprawling Excel file, the team estimates they’ve reclaimed at least 25 percent of their planning time: time that now goes toward engineering instead of untangling scheduling conflicts.

• Short learning curve: Julean-Schwab and Ton emphasized that while the team got lost in a seemingly easy-to-use (but very difficult to update and navigate) tool like Excel, it took the team only a couple of hours to learn how to use Ganttic.

“Ganttic is very intuitive and all the Views are there just with a few clicks,” adds Ton.

Top features: The EDAG team’s favorites

Keeping a 4,000-square-meter facility running without overlapping schedules or missed deadlines comes down to a handful of features the Fulda team relies on daily.

Custom Views for different roles

With 10 different user groups and three distinct teams, not everyone needs to see the same data, since not every project leader is a tester and not every tester is a project leader. Custom Views let each group work from a layout suited to their role.

For example, when someone from another facility needs to see the Fulda schedule, they are given view-only access. This ensures the wider network stays informed, but the actual testing sequences in Fulda remain strictly protected from accidental edits.

Department leads use a high-level Resource View to check equipment availability. Project leaders track the exact sequence of upcoming tests. Testers rely on the daily view: walk in, check it, and know immediately which component goes into which equipment.

Structuring equipment with Resource Data Fields

Because EDAG plans machines instead of people, Resource Data Fields are central to how they categorize Resources, customized to capture technical specs. With this in place, any team member can filter to find an available testing unit or pull up the project leaders attached to a given project.

Managing sequences with Task Dependencies

Testing is rarely a standalone event. 

A physical-chemical method test, for example, might need to start immediately after an environmental weathering simulation ends. Task Dependencies link these related processes, so the required time gaps between resources and tasks are automatically respected and the testing sequence stays on track.

Drafting with the Unassigned Row

Certain tests call for especially careful planning. As a matter of fact, only a few people at the facility are authorized to plan them. For these, planners use the Unassigned Row to draft the task, line up the requirements, and assign it to the right piece of equipment once the schedule allows.

Building a unified system through the API

Resource scheduling is one piece of a larger software setup at EDAG, which also runs on SAP and custom internal data tools. They connect the two systems via Ganttic’s public API, importing project data from SAP.

Daily resource scheduling happens visually in Ganttic, while SAP handles bookkeeping and reporting. From there, the team pulls the data, exports it, and builds clean, formatted timetables for customers, so clients see only the relevant timeline without any of the internal scheduling detail. The API also connects the planner to their internal email system.

Securing the testing sequence 

We asked the EDAG team what would happen if their current visual planner suddenly disappeared tomorrow.

“People from shaker tests will cry, as they will have to export much more data from calculation tools just for timelines!” Daniel Julean-Schwab replies.

While his answer made our team smile, it highlights a very serious engineering reality. For a facility like EDAG, a scheduling error does not just mean a delayed meeting but a compromised 1,000-hour climate test for an automotive component or a disrupted bio-mechanical shaker sequence.

Ultimately, this is why the team had to leave rigid spreadsheets and complicated software behind. By putting their timeline into a visual, machine-first format, they removed the friction between planning a test and actually running it. The schedule no longer acts as an administrative hurdle. Instead, it quietly holds the entire testing process secure, allowing the engineers in Fulda (but also in their locations in Wolfsburg, Munich, Ingolstadt, and Boeblingen) to focus completely on pushing technology to its absolute physical limits, thanks to Ganttic.

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