Visual Scheduling Blog

Operational Agility sounds like one of those “buzzwords” such as Big Data, Freemium or Snackable Content, which keep reappearing on power point slides that typically baffle half of the audience. In the beginning, I took the term Operational Agility as is – quick & easy operations. By taking the simplest dictionary meaning of Operational Agility, it left me with more questions than answers. What does it mean to be quick & easy? How does a firm achieve this? And if this exists, why aren’t all firms practicing it?

In the Visual Production Scheduler, our Gantt add-in for visual production scheduling, tasks, resources and capacities are displayed along a timeline, thus providing an optimum overview for planners. A visual plan always faces the dilemma of having to show all information needed for the planner to quickly recognize planning conflicts and intervene while on the other hand avoiding to show too much information to not jeopardize the clarity. This is where tooltip and bar label come in: Important data is only shown when needed and presented in an understandable way.

Grasping the importance of a meaningful tooltip and bar label, we implemented an enhancement in the last VPS release:  The standard NAV information can now be supplemented for each of the VPS objects (PO line, PO routing line, work center, machine center) by equipping up to five internal custom fields with data to use them in tooltip and bar label.

To do this, follow the instructions given in this blogpost. 

Long-awaited and much-longed for: The Visual Jobs Scheduler (VJS) for easy project and resource planning with interactive Gantt charts is now available as Dynamics 365 Business Central extension on AppSource. As having announced in my last week's blog about the new VPS, I will give you a short tour today.

But first, as we are actually still beaming with pride, let me stress again the fact that with releasing also the VPS and the VRV we are now the company offering the most complete stack of visual scheduling software for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Having said this, let's get you familiar with the new VJS.

Knowing our proven Visual Scheduling Suite for Dynamics NAV (2013 up to 2018) you will be glad to hear that the Visual Production Scheduler for easy production scheduling with interactive Gantt charts, is now available as Dynamics 365 Business Central extension on AppSource.

Together with the simultaneous release of the VJS for Dynamics 365 BC and  of the VRV in May this year, this makes us the company offering the most complete stack of visual scheduling software for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and NAV of which we are really very proud.

For a while, our Marketing claim is the same. We are the company with the most complete stack of visual scheduling software for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and NAV. The finished second calendar quarter underlines this claim. We achieved the hat trick and published three visual scheduling apps on Microsoft’s AppSource. With this, the second generation of our Visual Scheduling Suite is taking shape.

Partners and customers from now on can achieve a seamless visual scheduling of production orders, jobs, and resources. Also, they can get a comprehensive resource Gantt chart. The latter shows allocations from jobs, service orders, assembly orders, and absences. The Q2 hat trick brought thee apps to AppSource. Visual Production Scheduler (VPS), Visual Jobs Scheduler (VJS), and Visual Resource Viewer (VRV).

It's been a while since I provided you with news and information about our add-ins. At the moment, we are quite busy with developing our Visual Scheduling Suite 2.0 – based on JavaScript and fully applicable for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (and NAV), for cloud and on-premise.

But, of course, we don't neglect our "good old" proven Dynamics NAV add-ins for visual scheduling and a question that was brought to me recently was how to work with linked production orders in the Visual Production Scheduler. This question can be answered easily and quickly - and as I'm sure many of you would like to know how this is done, I'm gonna share the solution with you today.

During the last years we gained a lot of experience in developing HTML5 Gantt charts. It boiled down to a generalized model for resource planning, that is now basis of our Visual Scheduling Widget. How this model looks like, I started to explain in my previous blog post, when I described the data model and its' different types of objects we think are relevant to visualize resources and their activities.

In this post I explain how to map the members of this data model to interactive graphical representations. So the second (and last 😉) part  of my series of blog posts about our generalized model for HTML5 Gantt Charts refers to the concept of mapping. 

Time is flying, and it is over a month ago that I attended Directions NA in Las Vegas - the essential partner conference for all Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partners in North America. When you visit a conference, a smartphone seems to be everyone's best friend, and I am no exception. I took a zillion of pictures. Last weekend, I showed a friend some impressions from Las Vegas and came across four pictures that are very meaningful to me. With that distance to the conference, I actually noticed how meaningful they are to me (and why) and decided to share in a blog post.