Air gapped by design: On-premises project management software inside EKS InTec's own network

Before Easy8: Redmine, Excel and Outlook

EKS InTec started with open-source Redmine for ticket and project management. Everything around it lived somewhere else: Excel, Word and Outlook. Project planning, checklists, support topics, task tracking and reporting were spread across separate tools and spreadsheets, which made the whole picture hard to hold in one view.

• Information and tasks sat in different tools.
• Project planning and project tracking were less structured.
• Keeping an overview of tasks, projects, people, project delays, workload and effort took constant manual work.
• Support tickets needed additional manual effort to track and follow up.
• Documentation and traceability of projects and tasks needed improvement.

Over time the company identified the need for more functionality, better structure and a more integrated solution, and above all a more secure, clearly structured and centralised approach to personnel and project planning.

Expectations

EKS InTec expected the implementation to:

1. Improve project and task management, planning and execution.
2. Improve project documentation and traceability.
3. Create transparency around tasks, projects, responsibilities, people, progress and delays.
4. Make time and effort tracking reliable.
5. Reduce manual effort in support ticket management and make support requests traceable.
6. Establish a more structured way of working across teams, with reporting management can act on.

Requirements

The company required:

1. A single platform covering project management, resources, time tracking and help desk, rather than one tool per process.
2. A Redmine alternative that could take over from their open-source installation without losing the ticket and project structure they already had.
3. Help desk with email ticketing, so support requests arrive and stay in the same system as the project work.
4. Reporting and visibility into daily project progress for project managers and management.
5. Deployment inside the company's own infrastructure, with full control over access rights, logging and retention.
6. No connection to the public internet on the installation.

Why Easy8?

Colleagues evaluated the solutions available on the market and chose Easy8. The deciding factors were the breadth of one platform against the strictness of their own security model:

• Air-gapped on-premises deployment: the installation runs inside their network, with no route to the public internet.
• One system instead of several: project planning, resources, time tracking and help desk in the same place.
• A Redmine path forward: a step up in functionality and structure from the open-source installation they already knew.
• Control over the data: access rights, logging and retention stay in the company's hands.

Solution

Air-gapped, on-premises deployment

EKS InTec needed the stricter version of on-premises project management software: an air-gapped environment, cut off from the public internet entirely.

EKS InTec runs Easy8 as an air-gapped on-premises deployment inside its own network, with no connection to the public internet. All project, resource, time-tracking and support data stays within the company's own infrastructure and access control.

What that setup delivers:

• EKS InTec project data and engineering IP never leave the company network.
• No internet-facing attack surface on the installation.
• Full control over access rights, logging and retention, which supports customer security requirements and ISO 27001 or GDPR obligations.
• One system for project planning, resources, time tracking and help desk, all inside the secured network.

One secure system for project management and help desk

Easy8 carries project planning, project execution and project documentation, task management, time tracking, resource and personnel planning, project tracking and reporting, support and help desk, quality checklists, VIBN activities, and daily planning and follow-up.

Project managers, service and support teams, and engineers and project participants all work in the same installation. There is no separate on-premises ticketing system to keep in sync, and no cloud service holding a copy of the data.

Workflows in daily use

• Tracking tasks and their status across projects.
• Giving everyone involved a clear, structured overview of tasks and responsibilities.
• Tracking quality checklists.
• Tracking and managing support tickets.
• Planning and monitoring resources.
• Tracking project progress and delays.
• Documenting project activities and reporting on project status.
• Tracking working time and effort.

Evaluation and results

Transparency across projects

• A better overview of tasks, projects, people and responsibilities.
• Everyone involved in a project can see progress and task status.
• The system holds that information in one consistent structure.

Less manual work

• Tracking support tickets takes less effort.
• The company relies less on scattered Word, Excel and Outlook processes.
• Tasks and project information stay in one place.

A support process the team can trace

• Support requests are easier to track.
• Response speed has improved.
• Traceability of support requests has increased significantly.
• Following up on a ticket takes fewer manual steps.

Stronger project management

• Projects carry better documentation.
• Delays and progress are easier to track.
• Workload and effort are clearer.
• Project and resource planning is more structured.

Running the help desk on-premises did not cost EKS InTec any of the convenience of a hosted tool.

The most used features

• Project and task management: tracking tasks and their status across every project.
• Gantt: planning project timelines and spotting delays early.
• Time tracking: recording working time and effort per project.
• Resource management: planning and monitoring people across parallel projects.
• Reporting: project status, progress and activity for project managers and management.
• HelpDesk with email ticketing: managing support requests inside the same on-premises installation.
• Quality checklists: tracking the checks that engineering work has to pass.

What comes next

Easy8 currently covers agile project management and support at EKS InTec. The next step is software development with Scrum, so the platform carries project management, support and development in one place, all inside the same air-gapped network.

Conclusion

For an engineering partner in automotive and industrial automation, a work management platform has to answer two questions: what it can do, and where the data sits while it does it. EKS InTec answered both at once with secure, self-hosted project management software. Easy8 runs air-gapped on-premises inside its own network, and it carries project planning, resources, time tracking, quality checklists and the help desk in one system.

The company keeps full control over access rights, logging and retention, which is what its customers' security requirements demand. And with Scrum for software development coming next, the same secured installation is set to cover more of the working day.