When developing the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler to bring finite capacity scheduling capabilities to Business Central, we researched, surveyed, and heard what our customers had to say. They oftentimes asked us for ways to achieve production schedule simulations.
The reason being twofold: First, they wanted to build various scenarios of a schedule, and then compare them. Second, they also aimed at decoupling scheduling from the live production data so that changes to the schedule would not immediately impact the shopfloor execution. Read this blog post to learn more about production schedule simulations with the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler (VAPS).
Technically spoken, a production schedule simulation is a copy of your latest production schedule. You can work with that copy and check how certain changes to your schedule would impact your entire production schedule, but naturally without impacting your Dynamics 365 Business Central database unless you decide to do so.
The VAPS brings a comprehensive toolset to let you understand how your production schedule looks like, plan, squeeze in rush operations, bulk schedule all new production orders, reassign between machine centers, among other benefits to let you answer the “what if” questions:
What if, what if, what if …
With the production schedule simulation architecture, you can build as many schedule scenarios as you need, compare them and choose which and when to publish. Along with the VAPS color views you can compare the built scenarios from many aspects, for example, regarding the on-time deliveries, waiting times between production order routing lines, material availability, work center capacity or following a problematic bottleneck.
The easiest way to decide which production schedule simulation suits you best is with the “Compare simulations” function. From this "Simulations KPI" page you select the simulations you want to compare and the KPIs you are interested in. The "Simulations KPI" page shows the following Key Performance Indicators per simulation:
This tool should help you make the most informed decision on which simulation to publish. In order words, which schedule to follow. As the VAPS is a finite capacity scheduler, you will not have to worry about creating overloads when moving things around, only on when the production orders can be completed.
The Visual Advanced Production Scheduler is the finite capacity scheduler you were waiting for. The VAPS is an extension designed for manufacturers requiring more advanced scheduling capabilities than offered by standard Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The VAPS is made for Business Central (v14, cu1 minimum) only.