We are delighted to invite the team of the Italian woodworking technology company SCM for the interview. They are going to share their experience of implementing DHTMLX Scheduler as a working calendar in their industrial application for managing woodworking machines.
Could you tell us a bit about your project?
We are developing a complex industrial application to monitor and manage woodworking machines, while they are operating in the field. We have two manufacturers involved in the project: one is dealing with woodworking machines, the other is responsible for other materials. Each manufacturer has many customers and their own operating machines. Our task is to provide each end-user from both manufacturers with a view of their machines in terms of what they are doing right now or in the last weeks and how they perform with respect to the expected availability. We use your component not as a scheduler but rather as a working calendar, in which it is possible to declare what will be the expected working period for each day of the week.
Now let us have a look at a short demo of our app and find out how your JS component is used. Here you can see a working calendar, in which you can define a standard working week with flexible working hours. We also integrated a custom mini-calendar. It is a calendar plugin for Vue.js. So we’ve made plenty of customizations to adapt to our mockup and layout.
Why did you choose DHTMLX Scheduler over other scheduling solutions available on the market?
We had to find the most suitable component for our project. We tried some solutions and decided to choose your product because it is ready-to-use with a high level of layout customization to manage week planning.
What are the most important Scheduler features for you?
On the backend, it is essential to be able to define the Agenda. On the frontend, it is nice to have a multislot event by day, move with drag-and-drop, and create events with simple mouse dragging.
Have you faced any difficulties working with DHTMLX Scheduler?
It took some time to adapt the layout of the DHTMLX Scheduler to our internal mockup.
Do you have any recommendations on how we can improve DHTMLX Scheduler?
It is really hard to work with events that have a short duration period (like 15 minutes). So it would be great to have some solution for this problem.
Besides defining working shifts, it is important to be able to specify and manage national or custom holidays in the calendar. It would be helpful for us if your development team could provide such a built-in feature for showing national holidays. Right now, we utilize a third-party library for this purpose.
Our end-users are located all over the world, so they certainly have different national holidays. For example, the 4th of July is a national holiday in the US, while it is a normal working day in Italy. If the Scheduler had the integrated configurable functionality for managing national holidays, it would save us a lot of time. Users would be offered national holidays of their country to be accepted and the calendar would be automatically filled with the national holidays of that country. On top of that, users should have the possibility to add some working holidays i.e. non-working days for a specific company.
Which frontend and backend technologies do you use together with DHTMLX Scheduler?
On the frontend, we rely on Vue.js, while the backend part is implemented with the help of Node.js.
Thank you very much for your answers, we really appreciate the thoughts and suggestions that you’ve shared with us. We wish you the best of luck with your project.
The customer spotlight section is devoted to the stories of development teams from all over the world, who use DHTMLX libraries in their projects. You can learn more about the JavaScript Scheduler and read other stories on our website.