Visual Scheduling Blog

The Visual Production Scheduler (VPS) is an interactive graphic planning board for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, visualizing production orders, production order (routing) lines, and operations in connection with the capacity utilization of work and machine centers. Operations can easily be moved by drag & drop, thus not only providing new transparency of the Dynamics NAV data but also enhancing the Microsoft Dynamics NAV production scheduling capabilities.

Fair enough: we are pretty focused on developing and enhancing our visual scheduling extensions for Dynamics 365 Business Central. Nevertheless, we also continue to maintain and develop our visual scheduling add-ins for Dynamics NAV ... supporting the large "Navision" customer base. 

Hence we are proud to announce a comprehensive release of a new version of the VPS. It comes with a truly wide range of new and powerful features the Visual Production Scheduler for Dynamics NAV has been equipped with.

Just in time before the summer break we can present you with version 1.6 of our Visual Advanced Production Scheduler (VAPS), the only available finite capacity scheduler that fully integrates with the manufacturing module of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. This version has already been approved by Microsoft and can be downloaded from AppSource as of now.

I hope you will enjoy reading about the new features and after that - who knows - play around with them directly ;-).

Our experience with hundreds of production scheduling customers from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV market has proven very impressively that starting using an ERP system for production planning in most cases is perceived as difficult.

A lot of the ERP "beginners" come from having used the most diverse planning systems with the most diverse level of technological development, such as corkboards with tacks, whiteboards, and the famous homegrown Excel spreadsheet, to mention just a few.

To us, it seems that many people face significant difficulties in knowing where to start because ERP systems can be really overwhelming. So with this blog, we want to offer some assistance by sharing the insights we gained from our experience with our partners and customers and show what can be done to make you ready to jumpstart production scheduling in Business Central.

The German manufacturing company Winter + Freis replaced their "analog" production planning with an ERP system and realized that a graphical planning board was needed in addition to make their processes more transparent and thus provide more planning security for their employees.

Read in this blog post how the Visual Production Scheduler made this happen.

When thinking about a blog topic and knowing I wanted to write something about visual project planning, I came across a lot of internet articles about the typical reasons why numerous projects fail. While there seem to be a number of somehow "personal" or "subjective" reasons for project failure, like a project manager doing everything on his/her own or poor communication within the team, there are also enough more tangible, objective ones, such as dependency and/or resource conflicts, etc. 

Because it's obvious that no software or tool can help people to overcome the "subjective" reasons that prevent them from successfully completing a project, in my article I'll focus on the more objective reasons and how to overcome them by using the ERP system Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central together with a graphical planning board. 

Shortly before Easter, we released version 1.5 of our Visual Advanced Production Scheduler (VAPS), the only available finite capacity scheduler that fully integrates with the manufacturing module of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. This version has already been approved by Microsoft and can be downloaded from AppSource as of now.

See below the new features that will further facilitate your work with the VAPS.

We finished the new releases of our extensions for visual scheduling in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central shortly before Easter and now are glad that already versions 1.10 of both  the Visual Production Scheduler (VPS) and the Visual Jobs Scheduler (VJS) were approved by Microsoft and can be downloaded from AppSource as of now.

So, sit back and see what we have on offer.

With the planning worksheet and MRP (material requirements planning), Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central offers a both efficient and powerful tool for achieving the equilibrium of item demand and item supply. As such, the planning worksheet obviously (automatically) creates production orders to meet a certain demand. However, this creation of the production orders is purely demand-driven and does not take into account the current schedule especially with respect to work/machine center load. 

Finite capacity scheduling (e.g. of those production orders that were created via the planning worksheet) is achieved by using the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler (VAPS). However, combining MRP and finite capacity scheduling can be tricky. The big question here is: Which tool should take control over which production orders? Hence, this blog outlines how to best utilize MRP together with the VAPS (instead of both tools working against each other).