Visual Scheduling Blog

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!

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?