Project Schedules is a planning tool for customers who run project-based work — construction jobsites, maintenance campaigns, field installations, or any multi-week effort where specific assets need to be on specific tasks at specific times. It presents your plan as an interactive Gantt chart, lets you break work down into activities, and lets you allocate your actual assets to the resources each activity needs.
When to use it
Use Project Schedules when any of the following apply:
You plan work over days, weeks, or months and want to visualise the timeline
You need to decide which asset goes on which task at which time
You want to catch scheduling conflicts before they happen
You coordinate across projects and need a portfolio-level view
You want to see, from an asset's perspective, every job it is booked for
Key concepts
Project
A container for a body of work, a jobsite, or a contract. Projects exist in Nektar before Project Schedules is turned on — you are already using them to group assets, record time cards, etc. A Project is the parent of Schedules.
Schedule
A planned timeline that belongs to a Project. Has a start date, end date, and assigned roles: a Project Manager, a Superintendent, and a Foreman. A Project can have several schedules over its lifetime (e.g., a master schedule plus a revised schedule).
Activity
A task or phase inside a Schedule. Activities can have sub-activities so you can break the work down as deeply as you need. Each activity has its own date range inside the schedule.
Resource Requirement
A specific resource need inside an activity — for example, "need 2 excavators from June 1 to June 10". A Resource Requirement has a quantity and a date range, and it is created from a Resource Definition.
Resource Definition
A reusable template that describes a kind of resource need: which asset class, category, and type are eligible, an icon, a colour, and optional rules (filters) that restrict it further. Definitions are set up once and reused every time someone adds a Resource Requirement.
Allocation
An actual asset from your inventory assigned to satisfy a Resource Requirement. A Resource Requirement says what is needed; an Allocation says which specific asset will fill it.
Enterprise Schedule
A read-only, portfolio-level Gantt view that shows every schedule in your organization side by side. Leadership and PMO teams use this to coordinate across projects.
Typical workflow
Your Nektar administrator turns the feature on in Company Settings. For step-by-step setup, see Enabling Project Schedules.
A planner builds the Resource Definitions you will reuse. For how to create them, see Creating Resource Definitions.
A Project Manager creates a Schedule for a Project. See Creating and Managing Project Schedules.
They break the schedule down into Activities and attach Resource Requirements to each one. See Building Your Schedule: Activities and Resource Requirements.
They allocate actual assets to each Resource Requirement and resolve any conflicts. See Allocating Assets to Resource Requirements.
Leadership monitors progress and deconflicts across projects in the Enterprise Schedule. See The Enterprise Schedule.
Field users and asset owners see every schedule a given asset is on, directly from the asset's summary page. See Schedule Allocations Widget.
Next steps
Just getting started? Read Enabling Project Schedules next.
Already turned on and ready to plan a project? Jump to Creating and Managing Project Schedules.
Want the hands-on view of the Gantt? See Building Your Schedule: Activities and Resource Requirements.