DHTMLX Gantt has a solid reputation across the development community for its advanced scheduling capabilities. A new vivid testimony of that came from France, where the company Zozio integrated our JavaScript Gantt component into its platform for industrial manufacturers. Today, we are speaking with Augustin Rungeard, the head of product at Zozio, who has agreed to share the company’s experience with DHTMLX.
Could you please tell us a bit about your project and your role in it?
I’m Augustin Rungeard. I’m the head of the product at Zozio, a Paris-based startup specializing in scheduling and operational optimization solutions for production environments, including Manufacturing and MRO workflows. Our main product is called ROBIN. It is a cloud-based platform designed to help optimize industrial production flows and logistics. In ROBIN, we modalize the main resources that affect scheduling decisions (e.g. machines, personnel, tools, stocks, and other assets). Each resource has a range of meaningful parameters. For instance, machines can be available, under maintenance, or in failure mode, while human resources are characterized by skills, availability, and leave status. The system takes all these constraints into account and suggests an optimized schedule for our customers. For instance, if someone gets sick or becomes unavailable for any other reason, the new constraint is entered into the system, and ROBIN recalculates the schedule that reflects the new situation.
All of this is powered by what we call a digital twin. This module is the first level of our service offering that provides a real-time digital representation of resources and workflows. Each machine or tool is presented as a digital object, whose status is continuously updated. These objects can have various properties (availability, maintenance dates, etc.) that are also taken into account during scheduling. Apart from that, users can build dashboards using the drag-and-drop UI. These dashboards are extremely useful for making day-to-day decisions.
In addition to scheduling, ROBIN also includes an IoT-based tracking and tracing solution. Using electronic labels similar to those used in supermarkets, operators can see priority changes when, for instance, new, more urgent orders appear. The platform can also automatically track orders as they move through different areas of the factory, updating their status in real time. On top of that, ROBIN also supports alert mechanisms and business rules, which help in timely addressing various issues or incidents.
Currently, we are using the Gantt component for managing schedules and resources, but we also plan to add your JavaScript Scheduler solution next year, to manage resource unavailability schedules (maintenance, breakdowns, leave, illness, etc.).
What DHTMLX Gantt features do you actually use?
DHTMLX Gantt helps us schedule all the orders with their associated tasks. What we really like about your component is the ability to work with resources for each task using the lightbox editor.
Using the resource management feature of DHTMLX Gantt, we can visualize resource load and capacity directly in the timeline. Thus, users quickly notice any misallocations of resources , which is essential for optimizing Manufacturing and MRO operations and for improving OEE, OTD, and TAT.
The visual implementation of your Gantt differs significantly from the default design. You have performed a lot of styling customizations, right? Was it difficult to achieve this result?
Not really. The documentation for DHTMLX Gantt is clear and well-written. It helped us implement the visual customizations without running into serious issues.
Why did you choose the DHTMLX component over other options available on the market?
We benchmarked several products, including DHTMLX, Bryntum, and one more Gantt library, and Webix. One of the key requirements was the resource load capacity view, which is not something easily found in existing libraries.
Another important factor was ease of integration. The interface of our app is based on React and Chakra UI, and we needed the Gantt component that would fit smoothly into this stack. Also, ROBIN is provided as a cloud-based solution (SaaS), but we also support on-premise deployments. This flexibility is important for our customers from such sectors as defence, where systems often run on offline or dedicated networks. Around 30% of our customers operate in such environments, so the deployment flexibility was also one of the selection criteria. Certainly, we paid attention to the documentation quality and price. All in all, DHTMLX offered a good balance between functionality and cost.
Do you have any recommendations on what can be improved in our Gantt component?
One area for improvement is a more zoom-aware way of visualising working and non-working periods on the Gantt timeline. In our implementation, non-working periods are highlighted in blue, which can be clearly seen at higher zoom levels, but when zooming out, entire columns appear blue, making it hard to distinguish between working and non-working time. Therefore, it would be nice to have a view, where non-working periods are hidden or visualized in a better way.
You mentioned that your solution is written with React and Chakra on the frontend. What technology do you use on the backend?
The backend of our app is based on Node.js. Apart from that, we have a special AI scheduling engine (Robin.solver), which we like to call our “magic button” due to its ability to quickly generate optimized schedules. Written in Python, it generates optimized and consistent schedules while taking business constraints into account.
Thank you very much, Augustin, for this insightful conversation. Good luck with the idea of adding DHTMLX Scheduler to the ROBIN platform. We believe that it will justify all expectations and investments.
Visit our “Success Stories” section to read more informative interviews with DHTMLX customers.