Best Practices for managing 60+ projects in Smartsheet

Hello,

I am a fairly new user of Smartsheet and have recently started at a construction company as a project manager where we design manufacture and erect large steel buildings for rural and industrial use. (From farm sheds through to aircraft hangers and fabrication workshops.)

We have up to 70 projects active at any one time in various stages from initial contract signing and council approval through to coordinating our erection teams on site.

We currently run each project on a single sheet with the dates for each milestone as indented dependencies but run the actual task management on a separate excel workbook.

I am looking at how we can run the entire project and tasks in a single system and would like to know what your ideas or experiences are for setting this up in smartsheet and best practices.

i.e. do we run all the projects on a single sheet and make our indent list longer or is it sensible to have 70 separate sheets based on a template and use reports/dashboards to get an overall schedule view?

One of the main things we use smartsheet for currently is organising the projects in gantt view to schedule the fabrication dates inside our factory. Each fabrication duration is dragged back and forwards on the schedule so we have each project running one after the other through the factory. all other dates are linked to the fabrication date and are linked so they move accordingly. How could we do this if we have each project on a separate sheet?

If we were to combine our excel sheet with smartsheet it would also mean bringing in approx 70 tasks that relate to each project across different sectors of the business from drafting and invoicing to purchasing etc.

Ideas and help please!! :)