Visual Scheduling Blog

Finite capacity scheduling enables you to manage and maintain a production schedule efficiently. It helps with sequencing production orders on your machine and work centers and ensures you use your capacities wisely.

However, we all know that things seldom go as planned. Material arrives later than expected. Or it is there but cannot be used due to quality issues. A machine breaks. Your machine operator figures out that he has to run the machine slower than planned. Just to name a few incidents that can make your well-defined schedule obsolete every moment.

Two weeks ago, our CEO Martin held a webinar showing how you, as a production planner, can rapidly react to these incidents. He demonstrated the newly implemented integration with shop floor data of the latest VAPS version that lets you identify deviations from actual versus plan immediately and with which you can update your schedule on the fly - so that it is always current.

Read this blog to get a written wrap-up of the webinar with links to the respective minute of the presentation. At the bottom of the page, you'll find the link to the recorded webinar on YouTube.

In his latest podcast episode, Martin was super excited to have one of the North American Business Central manufacturing rockstars with him. Steve Chinsky is the Manager Dynamics Practice with Accelerynt. He has over 23 years of experience consulting, implementing, and managing Dynamics NAV and Business Central projects. His over 180 NAV and BC implementations were done in manufacturing, supply chain (aka WMS(, food and beverage, jewelry, retail, service, oil and gas, chemical, industrial equipment, and home goods industries. In addition to this, he worked over 16 years as an Accountant (CMA) in a variety of positions (Director of Finance, Controller, and Director of Operations). 

Steve is, among others, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Most Valued Professional (MVP), a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), and a Certified Navision Manufacturing Specialist. He is a Board Member and Program Committee Chair of the NAVUG (the NAV user group), Summit Program Committee Co-Chair, and he is on the Program Committee for DynamicsCON Live and the Content Committee for Directions North America. 

Our podcast is back! After a half-year break, Martin felt it was time to "revive" the podcast again, last but not least because many Business Central manufacturing enthusiasts reached out and encouraged him to continue with it. So, in episode 30, he was happy to talk to Jeff Brickler, solution architect at an ISV called CADtalk in Cincinnati, USA.

CADtalkisn’t exclusively made for Business Central. Instead, they have their background with other ERP systems and decided to bring their software to Business Central last year when Jeff and Martin met for the first time at Directions North America. Hence, he was excited to discuss with Jeff his lessons learned with manufacturers running different kinds of ERP systems. 

Jeff's background is quite outstanding because he hasn't been an IT/manufacturing person for his entire career. He started as a Latin teacher in high school with a master's degree in Classics. He joined CADtalkeight years ago and has worked closely with manufacturing customers as a support specialist, consulting and services manager, and solution architect since then. 

Planners do not want reservations between production orders and sales orders to break if production delays occur. Instead, they want to quickly understand which sales orders run late due to material and/or capacity constraints. To solve these problems, the latest VAPS version comes with an enhanced and improved integration of sales orders and production orders. As promised in his webinar on this release, our CEO Martin held an in-depth webinar on this very topic some weeks ago.

Read this blog to get a written wrap-up of the webinar with links to the respective minute of the presentation. At the bottom of the page, you'll find the link to the recorded webinar on YouTube.

Establishing configure-to-order (CTO) manufacturing processes is tempting. It promises the efficiency and scale effects of standardized (mass) production. Likewise, it pledges the flexibility and customer intimacy of a make-to-order manufacturer. However, theory and practice are two different things. I have met many configure-to-order manufacturers needing help to unleash the expected efficiency gains. Instead, they fight with ambitious customer deadlines and the mere complexity of their (semi-standardized) sub-assembly structures.

The obvious indication of this complexity is the sheer number of items and item variants in their ERP system. Combined with a multi-level bill-of-materials (BOM), this frequently leads to statements such as "we suffer from data ambiguity and fly blind when it comes to an understanding of the impacts of changes in our schedule."

This blog post describes why production scheduling is that hard and specific for configure-to-order manufacturers. Then, it provides production scheduling 101 for configure-to-order manufacturing and gives some ideas on how CTO manufacturers could tackle this challenge - especially when they work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

On 30 March, as a little Easter present, we have released version 1.13 of the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler (VAPS), the only available finite capacity scheduler that fully integrates with the manufacturing module of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. At the same time, we have released version 1.18 of the Visual Production Scheduler (VPS) and of the Visual Jobs Scheduler (VJS). This time, though of course we have improved and streamlined the other two extensions, our focus was almost exclusively on the VAPS and we have succeeded in making a really big throw. 

So, the VPS and the VJS will be mentioned only briefly and, because otherwise the blog would be really long, I will follow the structure of the webinar about the new releases and will cover two really huge new features in detail in two separate blog posts. 

The Visual Advanced Production Scheduler (VAPS), comes with functionality for production scheduling based on material availability information. Given the fact that Business Central does not offer material availability information on the production order level, this functionality is a topic of great interest. It does not only often come up during customer demos but people also told us that if they had known about it earlier, they probably would have decided earlier for the VAPS. So, our CEO Martin thought it would be good to share the educational material he initially had created for training purposes in a public webinar that he hosted some weeks ago.

Read this blog to get a written wrap-up of the webinar with links to the respective minute of the presentation. At the bottom of the page, you'll find the link to the recorded webinar on YouTube

Just in time before Christmas 2022, we have released version 1.12 of the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler (VAPS), the only available finite capacity scheduler that fully integrates with the manufacturing module of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Again, we have been really busy and came up with powerful new features that further simplify your life as a planner.

So lean back and see what the new version has on offer.