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.
The well-known link options - quick reminder
Let's have a quick look at the well-known options first.
Case #1
Links can be shown between operations of one production order line - coming from the respective routing. They can be sequential (as shown below) or parallel.
Case #2
Visualization of links of the different production order lines within one production order when the item is defined as “make to order”.
New option - linking production orders
Since the last release of the VPS (see here for the release notes), even links between production orders can be shown. This requires two steps.
Step #1 Enable the according option in the "Setup" dialog
Step #2 Reserve the needed amounts in the according (firm planned) production order
Let's imagine you have three production orders (and in the according BOMs you have defined the needed components):
- one for a bicycle (101008), needing the front wheel
- one for a front wheel (101010), needing the hub
- one for a hub (101011)
For creating links between the three production orders, you now have to make the according reservations. Lets start with reserving the needed amount of front hubs against your front wheel production order (101010):
- Click "Available to Reserve" in the "Edit Reservation" dialog (to open it, click "Functions ->Reserve" in the "Lines" area of the production order card)
- The dialog popping up now shows how much items you can reserve against which production order:
- For reserving, click "ACTIONS", "Reserve". After having done so, you see that 20 of your produced hubs are now reserved against production order 101010 (front wheel).
- Repeat these steps for the front wheels
Result
After having completed all reservations, the VPS shows the dependencies of all three production orders by dashed lines:
For having modifications of one production order impact also the linked production orders, activate "Schedule across Production Order Lines" in the "Setup" dialog:
If, in our example, you now postpone the hub production order, all dependent production orders will also be postponed accordingly:
More information
- Read about how to use custom indicators in the VPS.
- Watch a webinar on selected features of the Visual Production Scheduler.
- Learn more about Visual Scheduling for Microsoft Dynamics NAV in this ebook:
