Visual Scheduling Blog

Included in all Microsoft Office packages, Microsoft Excel oftentimes is the most likely software for companies to initially support business processes. Excel is powerful. Excel is flexible. Everybody can learn Excel fast. And you can significantly tweak Excel so that it increasingly becomes a homegrown business management system.

As such it is no surprise that many manufacturers initially use Excel for planning and scheduling. Also, it is no surprise that this works well for many of them. However, when those manufacturers grow, they no longer can run their company on Excel. They realize that they need a holistic business management system. Many of the customers we work with then decide on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. My colleague Lawin actually wrote a post about why Business Central is a great fit for SMB manufacturers.

When they make the move to Business Central they have to decide if they want to continue planning with Excel. Or if they want to start working with a (visual) scheduler that is integrated with the entire system. This blog post reveals details of why Excel is a great starting point, when to leave Excel, and what the advantages of an integrated visual scheduler are. 

After demoing the Visual Jobs Scheduler for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central I came to realize our customers pointed out a couple of reasons to why they chose the Visual Jobs Scheduler as their ERP enhancement again and again.

In this this blog, I highlight the top three features.

They all point out that visual scheduling isn't a “nice extra” but instead a “must have”. Either for the complexity of the orders, for data safety or to have a better control over the projects in general.

Do you work in construction? Today we are happy to announce that we are collaborating with ProjectPro from the USA to introduce a version of our signature extension the Visual Jobs Scheduler, now connecting with construction software ProjectPro for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

This joint product is meant to provide jobs and resources users of Dynamics 365 Business Central with better business control and streamlined accounting for construction firms.

The product, named Visual Jobs Scheduler (VJS) for ProjectPro, will be sold through ProjectPro, a Netsmartz company. This construction focused first version of the VJS for ProjectPro is available since April 2021.

Keeping in sync with our goals of releasing a new version of our extensions every quarter, the new Visual Jobs Scheduler (VJS) for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central was recently approved by Microsoft and is now available for trial and download at the AppSource. So, why should you get the new version?

In this blog, I will briefly describe the new additional great features to seek for.

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.