Visual Scheduling Blog

With its outstanding enterprise asset management (EAM) software, the Danish ISV Dynaway focuses on companies with high-value assets. The Scheduling Board add-on provides comprehensive dispatch information in one view, manual allocation of work orders as well as a direct connection to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Read in this blog post how the company developed a powerful dispatch board for maintenance work orders for high-value assets with the Visual Scheduling Add-in Developer Toolbox (VSADT).

PrintVis is the Microsoft-certified Print MIS, a software solution specifically developed for the print industry. The solution is built directly on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. It meets both the most basic and advanced needs of any type or size of print or graphical arts company, from quote to invoice, including full production management and a complete financial package with robust business intelligence from Microsoft.

Read in this blog post how the Danish company used the Visual Scheduling Add-in Developer Toolbox (VSADT) to build their PrintVis Planning Board - a graphical interface for plotting and adjusting a print company’s production schedule.

After our major release of the Visual Jobs Scheduler (VJS), our project plan and resource Gantt chart for Business Central, in June, we have used the summer break to respond to an urgent customer's demand and at the same time took the opportunity to add some other nice new features to the VJS. In spite of this being a minor release, indicated by the number 1.11.1.0, you will see that the features are in no way minor but will bring great effect to your planning.

So, after having enjoyed reading this post, don't hesitate and get your new version from AppSource!

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.