Visual Scheduling Blog

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.

In spite of the steadily growing automation, many small companies still plan their orders manually. Ideally, they use an interactive planning board for scheduling support. In this case, the order backlog (also called order pool or stock of orders) is an important part of this planning board. We have different ways to visualize this backlog for our customers, the presentation depending on whether the orders consist of several sub orders or not, e.g. For all of you dealing with Gantt charts and manual planning I have summed up four visualization versions.

We at NETRONIC pursue the mission to empower every SMB organization to gain operational agility with visual scheduling. Visual scheduling is the effective management and change of time- and resource-oriented planning data which enables faster decision making, more reliable delivery time commitments, and a better use of resources. Consequently, we offer Gantt charts for visual scheduling. In that regard, customers often ask us what we mean exactly when we speak about a "Gantt chart scheduler" and for whom this tool is appropriate. This blog post provides an answer to this question.

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.

In this post, Mercurius IT’s Operations Director, Lee Cridland, speaks to NETRONIC about his experiences of production and project task scheduling at Siemens and job scheduling at Mercurius IT, as well as provides insights into what good scheduling looks like.