Visual Scheduling Blog

Capacity scheduling is an important task for manufacturing companies. It enables them to meet their commitments to their customers in time. Typically, finite capacity scheduling is the glue between master production planning and production execution. It transforms the general plan into an actionable schedule - taking into account concrete restrictions such as finite capacity. 

Finite capacity scheduling is particularly important for make-to-order manufacturers who produce against concrete sales orders with hard delivery times. This blog shows how you can achieve finite capacity scheduling with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is Microsoft’s fast-growing ERP business management solution for small and medium-sized companies. As such, day by day, SMB manufacturing companies around the globe decide on this solution.

I wanted to better understand the profile of the manufacturing companies and “why” they are choosing Dynamics 365 Business Central. I gathered my thoughts based on conversations I’ve had with partners, guests on our podcasts, and customers. Then I combined that with information we got from our “State of Business Central and Manufacturing Report”. (btw: we are currently working on the 2022 edition of this report)

These sources of information helped to answer the question: "Why is Business Central a good fit for SMB manufacturing companies?"

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is a business management solution for small and mid-sized organizations. The software automates and streamlines business processes and helps SMB customers to manage their business. Business Central not only fully integrates with Microsoft's office product family. Moreover, it is highly adaptable and extensible with a plethora of apps provided by Microsoft's business application app store called AppSource. As such, Business Central enables companies to manage their business, including finance, manufacturing, sales, shipping, project management, services, and more.

Manufacturing companies that use Business Central gain the same advantages that any user of the solution gets: It supports them in achieving a streamlined, integrated, all-in-one management solution that handles every aspect of their business process from finance to sales, inventory & purchasing, warehousing, and stock management. In addition to this, Business Central comes with out-of-the-box manufacturing capabilities that seamlessly integrate with the modules mentioned before. 

This blog post gives an introductory overview of the essential out-of-the-box manufacturing functionalities of Business Central

Martin met again with Robert Jolliffe for the Business Central Manufacturing Show. He is our first guest, who is on the podcast for the second time. If you missed the first episode with him (in which we searched for the secret sauce of Business Central), I suggest you check it out here.

Robert is President & CEO of Sabre Limited in Canada. He has been an ERP consultant for 25 years and holds a Microsoft Engineer designation. In this episode, Robert shares with Martin why Dynamics 365 Business Central is the right system for engineering-to-order (ETO) companies. Of course, he does this thoughtfully and points out what makes ETOs so special.

Managing dependencies for your projects in an ERP system such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is not an easy task. Especially, as Business Central lacks the data type "dependency". In other words: if you are using the vanilla Business Central system, you have no option to define dependencies between e.g. job tasks or jobs.

Hence, you have to deal with them manually, or in your head, or in another system.

Well, this is a major missing puzzle piece within the Dynamics 365 Business Central jobs module and we decided to fix this. 

We conducted a global market survey within our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central customers and partners, to get a better understanding of the state of Business Central and manufacturing. The full 69-pages State of Business Central and Manufacturing Report is free for download. Alternatively, you can quickly digest four key findings from the below infographic.

Fresh out the oven! We just released version 1.11 of Visual Production Scheduler (VPS) on Business Central. This new version is available on-prem and can also be downloaded from AppSource for cloud customers. The new version brings a lot of new functionalities to the visual drag & drop production scheduler for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

If you are reading this blog post, you already know the difficulties of scheduling your production purely with standard Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central. Working on a proper schedule is so difficult. Typically, you get lost in all these open tables that are required to get all information needed. Let’s not forget to mention the difficulties to understand the grand scheme of things when you change data. Not to speak of getting this bigger picture by comparing the impact of data changes. The fact that many NAV and Business Central users regard this task as very tedious was, by the way, confirmed by the data that comes from our State of Business Central & Manufacturing Report.

In this blog post, I shed a light on how you can ease this task with production scheduling extensions and add-ins. While doing so, I also elaborate on the differences between purely manual drag & drop production scheduling and automatic scheduling based on scheduling rules