Visual Scheduling Blog

Are you struggling to find the easiest way to manage your production schedule? Through our clients, we have seen a long list of scheduling “solutions” that may sound familiar to you. Let me list a couple: Corkboards with tacks, whiteboards, Trello, the famous Excel spreadsheet, and most likely now some sort of "ERP scheduler" if you have been using Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Independent of which tool you use: If you are a production planner, chances are high you may struggle with keeping up your scheduling, and you may not know where to start (as there is so much to take into account when getting into a new ERP). 

There is no one to blame. The combination of ERP and scheduling is far from being trivial, most manufacturing companies vary, and getting used to a new procedure can be overwhelming. In this blog, we will share with you the proven 5 steps and the tasks you need for a smooth start into production scheduling (and its mastering).

When developing the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler to bring finite capacity scheduling capabilities to Business Central, we researched, surveyed, and heard what our customers had to say. They oftentimes asked us for ways to achieve production schedule simulations.

The reason being twofold: First, they wanted to build various scenarios of a schedule, and then compare them. Second, they also aimed at decoupling scheduling from the live production data so that changes to the schedule would not immediately impact the shopfloor execution. Read this blog post to learn more about production schedule simulations with the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler (VAPS).

Scheduling can be daunting. On many occasions it is not a straightforward thing. Once you get a schedule a tiny thing comes up and you have to change things again. When scheduling you have to keep a lot of factors in mind, such as the availability of your machines, the skills of your resources, the priority of the production order, the existence of the material requirements, the shop floor working hours, the machine preparation, among many other things.

Here is where Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central comes to save you. But then two pieces are missing, which is why we came into the formula as well.

Which type of information is important to you when scheduling? The item numbers? Is it the customer? Is it the quantity to produce? Or the process the order will go through? Is it the color of the item?

Some weeks ago, we realized that everyone searches for different information when looking at the schedule, this depending on the task they will perform afterwards. Hence, we decided to give our customers the possibility to choose what to see at first glance.

All this information I listed in the first question can be found within the production order, but we wanted to make it easier to find. This means you can customize the tooltips and the labels. And most importantly you can order it and decide what to leave out as you please.

Imagine this scenario:

You are a production planner and have a full schedule for this week and the upcoming. And now, one of your key customers calls and wants to order 4 additional items. These are Item 3000, 3007, 3008 and 3009. Being one of them a top priority.

The first question the customer asks is: When can you deliver this?

The second: What could be the earliest date to deliver for that priority item?

And a third may rise up, not from the customer, but most likely from your boss: Which jobs will be late and for which clients are they (if you squeeze in that top priority item)?

Typically you would need to make a couple of phone calls to answer, check in one Business Central table after the other (or in the Excel spreadsheets if its the case). But with the VAPS you can get the answer yourself in 6  quick steps.

Let me explain how!

When thinking of production scheduling, especially when it comes to an advanced software, many people imagine a magic button, that when pressed would magically optimize the production schedule. This is not what we offer with the VAPS, the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

This blog post outlines why this is the case, and why we consciously decided against that magic button.

Instead, to stay in the analogy of magicians, we thought of "muggle planners" and which concrete instruments would help them to do a very targeted "magic" to their schedule. Hence, the VAPS comes with a plethora of magic instruments. We call them scheduling instruments and they are meant to help solve very concrete scheduling challenges.

The Visual Advanced Production Scheduler (VAPS) is the first finite capacity visual scheduler fully integrated into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The VAPS adds functionalities to the proven manufacturing capabilities of Business Central.

Announcing the VAPS came with great results, but also with the question from partners and planners to "What is finite capacity scheduling?"

Finite capacity scheduling means to schedule with limited capacities on work and machine center level. Contrary to the standard Business Central scheduling that works with the assumption of infinite capacities, meaning it can easily overload your machines; finite capacity means limited machine capacities by default. Our current assumption with the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler is to have a capacity of 1 per machine center.

This means: each machine can work only on one operation at a given point of time.

In this blog we will show you a quick example to how finite capacity looks like in Business Central when working with our Visual Advanced Production Scheduler.

There’s no doubt we are in “strange” times, right? We all had to adapt, both personal and professionally speaking. Large events were canceled or postponed. Even the Olympics were deferred to 2021. Luckily for us, on the IT side of life, most of our events are migrating to online hosting, like Directions 4 Partners n this week. At NETRONIC, we embraced this spontaneous change by hosting our own virtual event, which we named next by NETRONIC. The idea of our "next" events is to talk about topics, rather than to demo products.

Our first session, back in May covered visual advanced production scheduling. We invited experts and the audience to take part in a session to talk about the main hurdles when it comes to production scheduling in Business Central and how to overcome them.

We had fun organizing and moderating our first session that we felt delighted with the idea of bringing up session 2. This time we discussed the constant battle between production planning & scheduling. And here is our takeaway!