A Gantt is not a timeline
90% of Italian “worksite” tools show you colored bars aligned on a timeline and call that a Gantt. It isn’t. A real Gantt has three ingredients those interfaces don’t have: dependencies with lag, calculated critical path, contractual baseline. Without these three elements, you’re not planning: you’re drawing.
CPM with lag: the detail that changes everything
The Critical Path Method is the engine that figures out which tasks are critical and which have slack. But on a real worksite, two tasks don’t always follow each other immediately: between pouring concrete and the next intervention there are curing days. That’s a lag.
In WorkSiteCRM the lagDays field is not decorative: it feeds into CPM and actually shifts calculated dates. If you plan an FS with lag=7 days, the early start calculation of the next task takes those 7 days into account. Sounds trivial but most open source engines don’t do it, and you end up with a critical path that doesn’t respect curing times.
Contractual baseline: the snapshot nobody takes
When you sign a works contract, the attached Gantt is your contractual baseline. From that moment on, every slip must be compared against that snapshot, not against last week’s updated version. In practice, almost no Italian software supports versioned baselines. Result: when disputes arise, you pull out a year-old PDF and try to reconstruct what was actually planned.
WorkSiteCRM lets you freeze a baseline with a name (“v1 — contract”, “v2 — supplementary appraisal”), display it as a shadow bar behind the current timeline and calculate deviations in real time. When the works director asks “how far behind are we vs the contract?”, you read it in three seconds.
Weather overlay: the killer feature for outdoor work
The obvious thing nobody has automated: weather determines whether a site day is recoverable or lost. WorkSiteCRM integrates OpenWeather to show a weather overlay right on the Gantt: if you plan a pour during a week with 70% rain forecast, you see it immediately as a yellow icon on the corresponding bar. It’s not magic: it’s a weather API query plus an overlay view with spatial/temporal matching.
Resources and over-allocation
Another classic: you assign a specialized worker to three parallel tasks and nobody warns you. In WorkSiteCRM each activity can have allocated resources with percentage and hours/day; a histogram under the timeline shows, per resource, how many hours/day they’re doing, and a red badge appears when capacity is exceeded. Again: obvious as a concept, invisible in 95% of Italian site management tools.
MS Project export and CSV for the works director
The works director wants a signable PDF? Export it with react-pdf. Wants the Gantt in MS Project to aggregate it with other sites from his company? MS Project XML export. Wants a CSV for Excel? Ready. No works director today settles for a screenshot.
What’s coming in the next release
We’re working on what-if scheduling (clone a baseline, move 3 activities and see the impact on the critical path without committing), automatic resource leveling and integration with the forecast module to warn in advance about weather-risk weeks. If you’re an Italian contractor interested in beta testing, write to us: we prefer few engaged customers to many napping ones.