As announcend in my last week's blog about the new features of the Visual Production Scheduler here comes the introduction of the enhancements of the VJS, our interactive planning app for visualizing jobs, job tasks, job planning lines and resources. Due to the summer break, I skipped the blog about the July release and now present you with the new developments of both the July and the August release.
Along with minor improvements and fixed bugs, the VJS has some nice new features to offer that you can look forward to.
#1 Create links between job planning lines
This is a major new feature having come with the July release.
The VJS now enables creating links between job planning lines by a new context menu. According to your needs and planning situation, you can select between two possible relations:
- Start-Start (the successor must not start before the predecessor)
- Finish-Start
The link structure you build this way, will be taken into account, when a job planning line in this chain is moved so that all job planning lines of the chain are moved according to their position, or remain where they are.
#2 Schedule successors
This feature, having also been implemented with the July release, is directly connected with the option of creating a link chain. It can be found as new entry both in the menu ribbon and in the context menu of the job planning lines and ensures that the link structure is taken into account with no buffer time, i.e. linked operations are processed without temporal offset. This applies for the selected node and all its successors.
#3 Indicate violated link orders in red
If the link order within a link structure gets violated, the according link(s) appear in red.
#4 Calculate and distribute planning line quantity taking into account a resource's capacity
As it is widely known, the quantity of job planning lines are calculated independent of the resource's capacity in standard Dynamics 365 Business Central . If you have a look at the resource "David Butler" in the screenshot below, he is allocated 16 hours on a day, but has only capacity of 8 hours.
If you want to bypass this way of visualizing the quantity, you can make use of the new feature that came with the August release. Since this is a company-wide setting, we implemented a new dialog “VJS Company Settings” where “Calculate Job Planning Line Duration” has to be ticked.
After having confirmed and reloaded, David Butler's task was lenghtened accordingly:
#5 Regard non-working periods when rescheduling job planning lines
If you have activated the “Calculate Job Planning Line Duration” option in the “VJS Company Settings”, the VJS takes into account days with no capacity when job planning lines are moved.
#6 Information during long calculations
When a calculation takes a bit longer, a status window pops up informing you.
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More information
- Watch a video presenting the new VJS features in a nutshell.
- Watch a recorded webinar about the Visual Jobs Scheduler or sign up for an upcoming one.
- Browse our knowledge base.
- Download our ebook about visual scheduling for Microsoft Dynamics NAV:
