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Angelo Lamme

General manager Operations

Airworks Inflatables: keeping multi-department creative production moving with GanttPRO

“The coordination between the departments is crucial and that's where GanttPRO for us comes into the picture.”

A story about a creative production company managing multi-department projects across several-week production cycles.

Company overview

Company: Airworks Inflatables

Roles interviewed: Angelo Lamme, General manager Operations; Kaho To, Senior Sewing Lead from Airworks Sewing Studio

Project types: multi-department, сross-team, public events related projects

External pressures: capacity planning pressure, tight deadlines, client-side and large-scale audience expectations

Tool history: Excel spreadsheets, Trello

Problems hinted at: limited visibility across teams and coordination challenges in previous tools

Summary

  • Gantt view is the foundation to Airworks’ day-to-day visibility in complex production environments with its different departments, client expectations, fixed event-driven deadlines, and live audiences involved.
  • Project triggers (milestones, deadlines, and notifications) is the main mechanism to keep team members aligned and any changes instantly spotted.

    • Company Background

    What does your company focus on?

    Airworks Inflatables is a production company with a special focus on designing and creating custom air sculptures for big musical festivals, famous artists and pop stars. Each project is a complex system, running up to 6 weeks, consisting of multiple stages, and involving around 40-50 people. The main layer of complexity lies in the number of departments, which increases coordination challenges.


    “We have multiple projects running at the same time for different clients and each goes through different phases. It could be that a project is in the design department, plotting or sewing stages. The coordination between the departments is crucial and that's where GanttPro for us comes into the picture.”

    We used a lot of Trello beforehand, tried out different Gantt chart platforms, but GanttPRO was the one that stuck with us

    Angelo Lamme

    General manager Operations

    Struggle

    How did your approach look before GanttPRO?

    Airworks has been using GanttPRO for 5 years and it is now a significant part of their project management approach. But before the tool was implemented, spreadsheets were their primary way to organize work. “We're still using spreadsheets, but mostly for the finer details. We used a lot of Trello beforehand, tried out different Gantt chart platforms, but GanttPRO was the one that stuck with us.”

    Solution

    • As many teams, Airworks uses GanttPRO on a daily basis for workflow predictions and capacity bottlenecks. “It's also in terms of prediction as we always look at the capacity that we have available for upcoming projects moving to the next stage. So it's also a forward-looking element that helps us scheduling the right capacity within the diverse workflows that we have.”

      Over time, the team came to the conclusion that they needed to narrow their focus instead of trying to implement all the features GanttPRO offers: “We were looking at too many features at first but eventually we focused only on what was necessary.” Right now, the overall logic of the tool, its visual and structural parts are the basics the projects require to function effectively.

      “We use it daily and especially for our daily production meetings. Every day we open the Gantt view and just check each department, where we are at the moment and where we have to troubleshoot.”

    • A large part of the team's work involves coordinating input from different departments and tracking stages as they move. As a result, milestones and deadlines have become irreplaceable for maintaining visibility, reducing the risk of delays, and seeing clearly what comes next.

    • Same goes with notifications: pop-ups keep the team aligned and make missed deadlines unlikely. These small alerts play a big role in reducing the risk of delays and keeping project flow on track.

    • Gantt view as a forward-looking element
    • Project triggers
    • Smart notifications

    Impact

    What does your work look like now with GanttPRO?

    After trying different levels of GanttPRO’s functionality, Airworks use the tool in the most simple way – Gantt view with milestones, deadlines, and notifications, serve as a stable and effective mechanism to control whole production process from start to finish, predict changes, and break work into stages with tasks and subtasks. What once required more scattered tracking is now managed through one clear visual workflow.