As user of and/or partner reselling our VPS Gantt add-in for production planning with Dynamics NAV you most naturally will be confronted with all kinds of customer requests now and then. A request that was brought to us quite often was to make the two types of conflict management, that hitherto were applied automatically on saving, customizable.
So we did some thorough thinking and came up with a solution serving even two purposes:
- it ensures undisturbed work in multi-planner as well as in single-planner surrounding
- it gains a faster saving process as side-effect
Mode #1 - Checking modifications of operations
Up to now, all operations from the VPS were automatically checked against the current NAV data on saving so that in case of a conflict the user was informed by a warning and crosshatched bars.
Conflict in this context means that, if, e.g., you have modified the plan by moving an operation, in the meantime, another planner could also have done some alterations to the plan. Even in a single-planner surrounding this sometimes happened due to changes made in NAV by another person.
In either cases, the warnings that constantly popped up when the plan was saved, often led to misunterstandings and slight confusion. People asked themselves "Hey, I didn't modify any production order - why do I get this message?"
So we enhanced the Visual Production Scheduler and made the conflict management customizable. The user can now decide whether to check
- All operations (default, status as known before).
- Only the modified VPS operations. This option helps to keep a better overview, since you are not "disturbed" by changes not concerning you.
- Nothing at all. This option may be useful if e.g. several planners are responsible for different machines and they know that they won't affect each other.
Mode #2 - Checking calendar/capacity changes
The other way of conflict management that we have made customizable is checking modifications concerning calendar or capacity. Conflicts in this case mean that although you might not have moved any operation in your plan, there might have been still other changes, namely ones that affect capacities or calendar. If, e.g., downtimes have been added or calendars have been modified, these changes could well affect capacities in a way that orders can't be processed in time.
The "old" automatic conflict management worked in a way that on saving the plan, all operations were moved by way of trial to check whether they had been changed due to capacity or calendar modifications.
Since these kinds of changes don't occur very often and a check should only be done every now and then, we decided to leave the choice to you and let you choose whether these conflicts are to be checked every time the plan is saved or not ("not" being the default setting).
The solution: Two options in the Setup table
To customize the conflict management options you have to run the table VPS-Setup. Here you find two columns where you can carry out the desired user-specific settings.
More information
- Read about how to use custom indicators in the VPS.
- Webinar on the Visual Production Scheduler.
- Learn more about Visual Scheduling for Microsoft Dynamics NAV in this ebook:
