Visual Scheduling Blog

If you enter the term „excel horror stories“ into your search engine you’ll get a long list of stories about financial disasters, wrong scientific insights or organizational nightmares being caused by the spreadsheet software. TransAlta lost 24 million due to a cut and paste error, designations of genes like SEPT2 get changed unnoticed into data by Excel, the NASA had wrong measure data in their Excel tables with which they keep on working, and so forth. Are you sure that there is no mistake hidden in your Excel sheets with which you run your company or plan your production?

A new release of version 1.4 of the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project planning in Dynamics NAV, is available. Several new features will further support you in precisely and comfortably planning your projects.

As always, the description of all new features and fixed bugs can be found in the release notes. I also recommend this video where some selected features can be watched in action.

And here is what we have worked out for you:

Gantt charts visualize tasks, resources or capacities along a timeline and so provide an optimum overview for planners. When designing them, one should keep in mind to directly show information that is essential for the planner so that he can quickly recognize planning conflicts and intervene. Showing too much information might jeopardize the clarity. That is why a tooltip is a good way of showing important data only if needed. What is true for Gantt charts also applies to tooltips: information has to be perceived quickly, meaning that it has to be presented in a clearly sorted and arranged way. This step-by-step guide shows users of our Gantt component VARCHART XGantt how to design a clearly arranged tooltip.

Over the past 5 years, we have grown our partner network and established our value in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV channel. The result has been a fun and rewarding journey, resulting today in a partner network of over 250 partners collaborating with us from all around the world.

With this extensive partner framework, comes the chance to work with myriad outstanding people and organizations. We've reached the point in fact, where our partner network and channel is so rich, that we've felt the need to allow our partners a chance to differentiate; a chance to shine. We have many great partners, but of course, there are those who are simply outstanding. 

The Visual Service Scheduler (VSS), our visual dispatch board both for the service and the resource planning module in Microsoft Dynamics NAV helps planners allocate service orders to the service technicians.

As user of and/or partner reselling the VSS, you certainly appreciate the easy way you can shift Service Item Lines per drag & drop from the order backlog to the Gantt area, thus allocating the Service Item Lines to the desired resources.

In this blog post I'll show you how to speed up this already fast and comfortable operation and thus significantly simplify service order scheduling with NAV.

“A picture is worth a thousand words” - this statement can by all means be applied to our graphical planning board add-ins that are the perfect choice when it comes to convincing potential customers of the added value of the ERP system in the pre-sales stage. They are intuitive-to-use, help making planning and resource data transparent, illustrate dependencies and allow a much more agile scheduling.

This blog post specifically aims at Microsoft Dynamics NAV partners and takes the Visual Service Scheduler as example for illustrating 4 important reasons why and how the graphical planning boards help to actively support the sales consultation and to underline the value of Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

As you already know, the release of version 1.4 of the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project scheduling with NAV, came with lots of new features that, due to the wealth of information, I'm introducing to you step by step. Last week you learned about milestones for better managed project execution and today I continue by describing a function of  the Visual Jobs Scheduler that will effectively help you keeping track of the time units consumed for your project - either during the project or after having finished it - and thus letting you promptly intervene if something is not as it should be or analyze where something went wrong.

I hope you enjoyed the Christmas season, started well into the new year and could recharge your batteries so that now you are eager to learn more about the mighty new features of  version 1.4 of the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project planning in Dynamics NAV. 

Today I'll be writing about the usage of milestones, this also being a feature many of you have asked us about. So, as your wishes are our commands we added them to the VJS.

Most likely you will all be quite busy with the work that the beginning of a new year always brings about and so I kept this blog short - but nevertheless substantial.