Visual Scheduling Blog

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!

As we like to remind users, the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler is the first finite capacity manufacturing scheduler for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Among others, it enhances the standard manufacturing module of Business Central by handling all machine and work centers as if their capacity always equals one (1).

If being finite is not enough reason for you to bet on it, in this blog I will briefly explain 6 further features that make the VAPS an advanced scheduler. These are added solutions to other most common challenges on the shop floor and its management. 

These are the earliest material availability date, production simulations, consideration of alternative machine centers, incorporation of a standby resource, the sales order view and the opportunity to see your schedule in regards to your preferred information, or as we call them color views.

Let’s dive into each feature, shall we?

The Visual Production Scheduler (VPS) has been our signature software since 2013. With the experience from more than 300 VPS customers using Microsoft Dynamics NAV, we knew that there are a lot of manufacturing clients that have higher scheduling requirements as what can get fulfilled with the standard Dynamics NAV, respectively Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central functionality.

For this reason, we very consciously decided for a two-pronged approach when we transferred our IP from Dynamics NAV to Dynamics 365 Business Central. On the one hand, we rebuilt the Visual Production Scheduler to prove customers with an easy-to-use visual drag & drop front-end to standard Business Central manufacturing. On the other hand, we started the development of the “bigger brother” to the VPS, which we named VAPS – Visual Advanced Production Scheduler.

The idea was, and is, to enhance the Business Central manufacturing module by those functions that the standard seems to lack, and that larger manufacturers require to better run their shops.

As of today, both the VPS and the VAPS are available on AppSource for Dynamics 365 Business Central addressing to improve the same module: Manufacturing. Then, what are the main differences between these two extensions?

Are you a production planner working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central? Or, are you a manufacturer assessing the use of Business Central? This is for you!

We’ve repeatedly heard planners asking for the best way to evaluate the impact on squeezing a rush order into the published schedule. Or wondering how to accelerate the rescheduling process of production orders when a machine breaks down, or an operation takes longer than expected. Some planners mentioned their struggle identifying bottlenecks. If you feel like you can relate, then you’re on the right path to fixing it.

Scheduling is no easy job. You need to match a production order to available machine times, skilled resources, required material, and a few other variables. An ERP, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is perfect for gathering the information you need to start scheduling. The issue being: Business Central displays all information as tables or within tables. There’s a great search field and filter functionality on top that eases the data hunt. But it would be simpler to see it in one view.

Who hasn’t heard the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words”? Well, that’s basically our motto. At NETRONIC, our goal is to turn your production schedule into a dynamic visual. As you may know, we accomplish that using Gantt charts. But we work to boost up the contributions of a Gantt chart for project, resource and production planners. How would you benefit from having a Visual Scheduler? Allow me to explain...