Bottlenecks are common occurrences that happen in any industry that work with limited capacity. In general, the existence of bottlenecks could lead to stalls in production, supply overstock, issues with customers and issues with employees. This blog post shows how visual scheduling can help you identify bottlenecks in production when you work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
We as NETRONIC Software, but also me personally (in my role as NETRONIC's CEO) have been engaged with Dynamics NAV (now: Business Central) and manufacturing for almost eight years. Year over year, we engaged more, we invested more, and we benefitted more. We benefitted from our customers, from our partners, and from this unprecedented Dynamics NAV / Dynamics 365 Business Central community. I feel that it is about time to give something back.
This "something" is a global market research study and its findings. We decided to leverage our global network of partners and customers to conduct comprehensive market research about the "State of Business Central and Manufacturing" in the year 2020. We do the study, we market the study, we analyze the findings, we write an extensive report, or to say it straight-forward: we do all the work that comes with that study, and we pay for it. However, we will share the report and findings. With everybody, for free.
Continue reading if you want to learn more, and if you want to contribute to the study.
In the manufacturing industry, it is normal to have machines break down. Therefore, companies invest in preventive maintenance. The same would be the case if you were working with actual people, who either get sick or go on planned holiday. Sometimes these breakdowns can be foreseen and planned for, but in some cases it cannot. During these unforeseen scenarios, in most cases companies would need to quickly come up with a plan B as to how their new plan would look like.
From an ERP perspective, this would cause a downtime to your resources, leaving you no choice but to either reschedule your operation earlier or later or if possible, reassign it to another resource. This blog post deals with exactly that scenario, and shows you to get to that plan B in a both effective and efficient manner.
When thinking of production scheduling, especially when it comes to an advanced software, many people imagine a magic button, that when pressed would magically optimize the production schedule. This is not what we offer with the VAPS, the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
This blog post outlines why this is the case, and why we consciously decided against that magic button.
Instead, to stay in the analogy of magicians, we thought of "muggle planners" and which concrete instruments would help them to do a very targeted "magic" to their schedule. Hence, the VAPS comes with a plethora of magic instruments. We call them scheduling instruments and they are meant to help solve very concrete scheduling challenges.
The Visual Advanced Production Scheduler (VAPS) is the first finite capacity visual scheduler fully integrated into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The VAPS adds functionalities to the proven manufacturing capabilities of Business Central.
Announcing the VAPS came with great results, but also with the question from partners and planners to "What is finite capacity scheduling?"
Finite capacity scheduling means to schedule with limited capacities on work and machine center level. Contrary to the standard Business Central scheduling that works with the assumption of infinite capacities, meaning it can easily overload your machines; finite capacity means limited machine capacities by default. Our current assumption with the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler is to have a capacity of 1 per machine center.
This means: each machine can work only on one operation at a given point of time.
In this blog we will show you a quick example to how finite capacity looks like in Business Central when working with our Visual Advanced Production Scheduler.
There’s no doubt we are in “strange” times, right? We all had to adapt, both personal and professionally speaking. Large events were canceled or postponed. Even the Olympics were deferred to 2021. Luckily for us, on the IT side of life, most of our events are migrating to online hosting, like Directions 4 Partners n this week. At NETRONIC, we embraced this spontaneous change by hosting our own virtual event, which we named next by NETRONIC. The idea of our "next" events is to talk about topics, rather than to demo products.
Our first session, back in May covered visual advanced production scheduling. We invited experts and the audience to take part in a session to talk about the main hurdles when it comes to production scheduling in Business Central and how to overcome them.
We had fun organizing and moderating our first session that we felt delighted with the idea of bringing up session 2. This time we discussed the constant battle between production planning & scheduling. And here is our takeaway!
The Jobs module of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is largely designed for project-savvy companies (like engineering-to-order, construction, or project services companies) to help them gain better control of their projects. The module seems to mostly focus on the aspects of financial project controlling rather than on the requirements of a day-to-day project management. And, what's more, especially the jobs module "buries" data in a deep hierarchy of tables: jobs, job tasks, job planning lines and resource allocations.
In this blog post I'll show you how you can easily complement your Business Central system with interactive project Gantt charts as well as resource Gantt charts. With this, you can see all of your project data at one glance and plan your projects visually per drag and drop - both time-wise and resource-wise.
This week’s episode is a special edition of the Business Central Manufacturing Show. Last week, hosted our online event called “next by NETRONIC – session 2”. The idea of the “next” events is to talk about topics, not about products as well as to discuss with each other rather than to have a 1-way demo. Hence, last week’s event was a panel discussion in which we looked at the constant battle between production planning and scheduling.
The discussion was led by Martin Karlowitsch, and his guests were experienced Business Central manufacturing experts. If you took some time to attend our event – a big thank you from all of us at NETRONIC, if not then please enjoy this podcast.