Visual Scheduling Blog

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.

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.).

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.