Release 1.8 of VPS and VJS for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Posted by Ute Gillet on Oct 5, 2020 1:49:52 PM

The summer break is long ago again and you will be back in your (home) offices again. I hope you had a nice and restful holiday and are all still well.

We at NETRONIC are back at work at full steam and can already present you with a new version of both the Visual Production Scheduler (VPS) and the Visual Jobs Scheduler (VJS). Version 1.8, as well as its versions before, offers some nice new features.

As always, the complete release information can be found in the respective notes for VPS and VJS. Moreover, both new versions will be  available in AppSource soon.

#1 Customizable table label in VPS and VJS = more really relevant information for the planner

Version 1.7 came with the new bar lable customization dialog that - in analogy to the "Tooltip" dialog allows for customizing the information shown on bars. In version 1.8 we extended this principle to the table lables so that you can now decide which information is to be shown in the table headers. See how this works in the VPS - in the VJS it is just the same.

The picture below shows the table label for a production order routing line, containing:

  • the operation number
  • a blank
  • the description in brackets

How to proceed

For customizing the table lable, proceed as follows:

  • In both extensions click "Configurations" in the "Actions" menu of the "User Setup" dialog:

  • In the "View - select table text" dialog, select the item for which you want to customize the table label which, in our case, would be "Production Order Routing Line":



  • The “Edit – Define Configuration” dialog pops up:

Here you can add, insert, edit, and delete fields as well as change their order. You can select the desired table name and field name from your Dynamics 365 BC data by clicking “…” .

Formatting the labels

Separate the field contents by a blank, or by the separators shown below by selecting the according character from the  “VPS Format Strings”  table.

 

#2 Histogram View both in the VPS and in the VJS

A histogram offers visual decision support by showing impending capacity problems. To make this even more comfortable for you we added a Histogram View to either VPS and VJS

  • The new Histogram View in the VPS  shows the histograms of the work centers and their respective machine centers.

  • In the Histogram View of the VJS, all histograms of resource groups and resources are displayed in the same order as in the resource view.

 

 

#4 Improved handling of changing the quantity in the VJS

Up to now, there was no option to change the quantity in the plan - you had to do this on the corresponding BC 365 card. We have made this easier for you by adding two similar new dialogs:

 

1. The new "Edit Change Quantity" dialog 

To conveniently change the quantity directly in the plan, the contextmenu of the VJS was enhanced by the item "Change Quantity":


Clicking this menu entry leads you to the self-explanatory "Edit - Change Quantity" dialog:


This dialog automatically pops up when you create a new job planning line by dragging it from the list to the plan in the "Creation mode".

VJS-new-jpl2

2.  Specify quantity when splitting job planning lines

A similar new dialog also pops up automatically when existing job planning lines get splitted - with this the quantity is no longer automatically distributed equally to both lines but can be defined in the dialog.

In this dialog you can specify

    • How the quantity is to be distributed between the two lines.
    • Whether you want to calculate partial quantity, so that when you enter the value for the first line, the quantity for the second line will be calculated automatically. At the same time, you get an error warning, when the quantity of part 1 ist calculated higher than the original quantity.

#5 Copy jobs including the links

This is a really powerful and handy feature for planners who, in their day-to-day work, mostly deal with similar types of projects and for this, often copy existing jobs when they have to create a new one, and afterwards modifying the new one accordingly. These planners will be glad to hear that from now on, the VJS also copies the link structure having been set up in a job so that they will be spared a couple of clicks.

VJS-copy-jobs-with-links

 

So, enjoy trying out the new versions  - and please stay healthy ;-)!

 

More information

 

Topics: Business Central Production Scheduling, Business Central Project & Resource Scheduling, Business Central Visual Scheduling Extensions, Release VJS, Release VPS