Visual Scheduling Blog

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.

As user or reseller of Microsoft Dynamics NAV you are well aware of the fact that working with the proven tool for (not only) simplifying the management of projects, tasks, and resources can sometimes be a bit cumbersome and time-consuming. You also know our Visual Jobs Scheduler (VJS) add-in and have already discovered some of its handy functions for reducing or even bypassing some of these behaviors in NAV.

With this blogpost I'd like to draw your attention to a simple technique that already exists in NAV and will, when used together with the VJS, make the planning much more agile:

See how to rapidly create new jobs by using templates and afterwards fine-tune the new jobs' timing and resource planning by drag and drop in the VJS:

A new version of the Visual Service Scheduler, our add-in for visual service order planning with Dynamics NAV, is available. Several new features further support you in precisely and comfortably scheduling and dispatching your service orders.

As always, the description of all new features and fixed bugs can be found in the release notes. 

See below what we've come up with.

A new release of version 1.4 of the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project planning in Dynamics NAV, is available. Several new features will further support you in precisely and comfortably planning your projects.

As always, the description of all new features and fixed bugs can be found in the release notes. I also recommend this video where some selected features can be watched in action.

And here is what we have worked out for you:

The Visual Service Scheduler (VSS), our visual dispatch board both for the service and the resource planning module in Microsoft Dynamics NAV helps planners allocate service orders to the service technicians.

As user of and/or partner reselling the VSS, you certainly appreciate the easy way you can shift Service Item Lines per drag & drop from the order backlog to the Gantt area, thus allocating the Service Item Lines to the desired resources.

In this blog post I'll show you how to speed up this already fast and comfortable operation and thus significantly simplify service order scheduling with NAV.

“A picture is worth a thousand words” - this statement can by all means be applied to our graphical planning board add-ins that are the perfect choice when it comes to convincing potential customers of the added value of the ERP system in the pre-sales stage. They are intuitive-to-use, help making planning and resource data transparent, illustrate dependencies and allow a much more agile scheduling.

This blog post specifically aims at Microsoft Dynamics NAV partners and takes the Visual Service Scheduler as example for illustrating 4 important reasons why and how the graphical planning boards help to actively support the sales consultation and to underline the value of Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

As you already know, the release of version 1.4 of the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project scheduling with NAV, came with lots of new features that, due to the wealth of information, I'm introducing to you step by step. Last week you learned about milestones for better managed project execution and today I continue by describing a function of  the Visual Jobs Scheduler that will effectively help you keeping track of the time units consumed for your project - either during the project or after having finished it - and thus letting you promptly intervene if something is not as it should be or analyze where something went wrong.

I hope you enjoyed the Christmas season, started well into the new year and could recharge your batteries so that now you are eager to learn more about the mighty new features of  version 1.4 of the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project planning in Dynamics NAV. 

Today I'll be writing about the usage of milestones, this also being a feature many of you have asked us about. So, as your wishes are our commands we added them to the VJS.

Most likely you will all be quite busy with the work that the beginning of a new year always brings about and so I kept this blog short - but nevertheless substantial.