The Swiss food supplements manufacturer, Nahrin AG, wanted to reduce the intermediate cleaning of the machines to a minimum. At the same time they need to react flexible to new orders and short delivery dates.
Read in this blog post how this worked out with the help of an individual extension of the Visual Production Scheduler.
Are you (or your customers) a small or mid-size make-to-order manufacturer? Do you use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central as your ERP system or are you thinking about using it? In both cases you might have already noticed that while the manufacturing module of Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium is quite a bit oversized for your purposes, the Essentials package lacks essential production planning functionality matching the requirements of your business. So far, you haven't found a satisfying solution to this problem?
So let me help you further by showing you how easily this dilemma can be solved by using our cloud-based software just plan it for visual production scheduling tailored especially towards small and mid-size make-to-order manufacturers.
Pest controlling has more and more become a highly complex service business, no longer being a mere matter of setting traps or placing baits but meanwhile also including making service contracts to ensure that the trap systems in the infested buildings will be checked and equipped on a regular basis. Moreover, comprehensive regular documentation is mandatory for the pest controller as well as for his customer. Pest controllers with a big customer base nowadays can’t do without consistently being supported by software. For this reason, many of them use the ERP system Microsoft Dynamics NAV that simply lets them better manage customer contracts, recurrent on-site services, invoices, and inventory.
Some months ago, I showed you how to speed up allocating Service Item Lines to resources in the Visual Service Scheduler (VSS) for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
But that is by far not all the order backlog of the VSS offers in terms of gaining more clarity and thus being able to allocate tasks to resources quickly, comfortably, and unerringly. Read today about three useful options of structuring your order backlog so that no matter which planning situation you are in, the orders shown will always fit this situation.
There's one thing most everyone working in production scheduling knows: No matter which system you use, however accurately your data might be, and how much time you have spent dealing with sophisticated scheduling algorithms - production reality never follows your system's implicit or explicit model. Hence, users of any production scheduling system should not only look at how it deals with a typical or an average production schedule, but they should also ask how the system supports them when dealing with unplanned incidents.
So this is why today I'd like to show you how to deal with short-term deviations from the planned capacity (i.e. when a machine operator calls in sick for a shift, or when a machine breaks down etc.).
The so called Jobs module of Microsoft Dynamics NAV is designed for companies with largely project-based business (like engineering or construction companies) to gain better control of their projects. Since the ERP system’s module seems to focus more on the aspects of financial project controlling rather than on the requirements of a day-to-day project management, I’d like to outline in this blog post how you can easily enhance your NAV 2018 system with interactive Gantt charts to facilitate a graphical drag & drop project planning.
If you search for getting tips about how to build a professional project plan, you'll find many useful posts and articles.
In nearly all of them you will stumble across milestones. Setting milestones is generally considered as indispensable when it comes to gain successful project delivery.
'So, that's all very well', you may think, 'but I'm a Dynamics NAV user and NAV doesn't offer any milestones'.
In today's blog I'll show you how to work around this shortfall - read how to create and use milestones in the Jobs Module of NAV. Furthermore, you will see how to visualize your milestones in the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project planning in Dynamics NAV, to gain further planning agility and clarity.
A key challenge in production planning is ensuring the necessary supply of materials – if just one little part needed for a certain product is missing, the whole production process might come to a halt. But it is not only shortage of material that should be avoided - either a too high stock of materials runs counter to the principles of material management.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV holds several Production BOMS ready to keep the needed materials in check, but – once again – this feature could be a bit suppler to handle and in times of high order density the planner might easily lose the overview when trying to keep track of the material availability with the help of lists and cards.
Read in this blog about two options of visually presenting the material availability in NAV that will make production scheduling with NAV more transparent and thus easier and quicker. At the same time you will again see how a powerful tool like NAV becomes even more powerful when supplemented by a visual production planning add-in.