Visual Scheduling Blog

It's been a while since I provided you with news and information about our add-ins. At the moment, we are quite busy with developing our Visual Scheduling Suite 2.0 – based on JavaScript and fully applicable for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (and NAV), for cloud and on-premise.

But, of course, we don't neglect our "good old" proven Dynamics NAV add-ins for visual scheduling and a question that was brought to me recently was how to work with linked production orders in the Visual Production Scheduler. This question can be answered easily and quickly - and as I'm sure many of you would like to know how this is done, I'm gonna share the solution with you today.

You most certainly know our Visual Scheduling Suite for Dynamics NAV (2013 up to 2018). But, of course, we are also "in synch" with the latest developments on the Dynamics 365 Business Central software and are currently in the process of developing our Visual Scheduling Suite 2.0 – based on JavaScript and - fully applicable for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for cloud and on-premises. So far, we've come up with the Visual Resource Viewer for Dynamics 365 Business Central for the cloud that allows managing your resources, their allocations, free or exceeded capacities and absences in one view. 

With this blog post you get a short introduction to our latest "baby" ;-).

The Kenyan supplier of innovative solutions for water and energy systems, Davis and Shirtliff, desperately needed to improve their internal information exchange process to ensure keeping delivery dates as promised to their customers.

Read in this blog post how this worked out with the help of the Visual Production Scheduler.

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.

Resource planning for pest controllers

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.).