For us at DHTMLX, building long-term relationships with customers has always been one of the top priorities. It is inspiring to know that many companies have been relying on DHTMLX over the years to move forward with their projects. Today, we are happy to reconnect with David Basri, the President of Point Enterprises Inc., who is ready to share new insights about using DHTMLX Suite and Scheduler in his StaffPro® app since our last conversation.
Hello David! It has been quite a while since we last met. What’s new on your project?
Actually, we did a complete rewrite of the application using the latest version of your library. It looks a bit different now, and it is much more sophisticated now. We use almost every widget from the Suite UI widgets library and a customized version of the JavaScript scheduling component.
DHTMLX Scheduler and Suite widgets implemented in the StaffPro platform
StaffPRO is a cloud-based application, but it can also be on-premises. Financial institutions like banks and credit unions use it for advanced employee scheduling and branch management.
Our software includes the following key features:
- Float/flex staff management – automates the process of scheduling float staff (i.e. specialists who are trained to work across different branches) using special scoring criteria. We achieved it thanks to Scheduler customizations. Here you can also find additional side panels implemented with Layout and List widgets.
Float management section with the customized DHTMLX Scheduler and side panels built with the Suite
- An extensive reporting system with more than 40 standard reports relating to branch staff and operations.
- Dashboards with DHTMLX-based charts, graphs, and tables that enable users to have various analytics, such as KPIs, at all levels of the organization. Charts and tables can be exported to CSV files.
Dashboard section built with DHTMLX Suite widgets
- Cash ordering system for optimizing branch cash levels and scheduling cash orders.
- A comprehensive administrative section, where admins can review and manage different kinds of things (employee profiles, working hours, etc.) via the menus built with Suite widgets.
Admin section based on DHTMLX Suite widgets
- The Forms module that allows creating any number of folders, forms, fields, and pages. Also, users can attach custom processes to these UI elements. It is possible to attach custom processes behind every field or form.
All in all, these examples prove an extensive use of DHTMLX Suite and Scheduler in the StaffPro application.
Do you have many new customers?
We have approximately 10 new customers. Across all of them, they have a combination of 600 or 700 branches.
Are there any AI functionalities in your project?
We don’t use AI in its true sense. We have a pretty sophisticated constraint programming engine that generates schedules. The constraint programming may seem similar to AI, but it is neither self-learning nor based on LLMs.
Are you familiar with such a trend in the programming world as vibe coding?
Yes, but we do not use code generation tools in our project. The StaffPro app includes about 100,000 lines of code, and it is fully written in-house. We just look things up to know how other people solve different tasks. As for the development process within our company, we often use your techniques in our JavaScript code (the backend is written in PHP), and your samples are helpful as well.
Do you have any suggestions or requests regarding possible improvements for DHTMLX?
Not really at the moment. I made several suggestions and reported a few bugs in the past, and your support team turned out to be very responsive. They always give me a workaround if there is a problem. All our suggestions were implemented in the next release. Right now, we are working with a lot of clients to get them upgraded to the latest release.
We did take a look at a new Scheduler, but we have so much customization in the old Scheduler, it would be just a lot of work to do. The Scheduler version used in our app does everything that we need it to do.
So, I’m a big fan of DHTMLX. We’ve been using your components for probably 20 years.
Have you considered adding other DHTMLX components to your app? For instance, Gantt?
Whenever you produce a new release, I always take a look at new things that become available. In fact, initially, we chose between the Gantt and Scheduler components, but the scheduler was closer to what we needed.
We got used to the way the naming conventions and the properties work in the newer version. Once you get used to that, it becomes pretty straightforward. You became more consistent about how things are manipulated, and it helps us a lot.
Thank you very much, David. We appreciate your long-lasting trust in DHTMLX and hope that our JavaScript components will help your application evolve in the future.
Our gallery includes more exciting stories on the use of DHTMLX components in real projects.