Visual Scheduling Blog

We as NETRONIC Software, but also me personally (in my role as NETRONIC's CEO) have been engaged with Dynamics NAV (now: Business Central) and manufacturing for almost eight years. Year over year, we engaged more, we invested more, and we benefitted more. We benefitted from our customers, from our partners, and from this unprecedented Dynamics NAV / Dynamics 365 Business Central community. I feel that it is about time to give something back.

This "something" is a global market research study and its findings. We decided to leverage our global network of partners and customers to conduct comprehensive market research about the "State of Business Central and Manufacturing" in the year 2020. We do the study, we market the study, we analyze the findings, we write an extensive report, or to say it straight-forward: we do all the work that comes with that study, and we pay for it. However, we will share the report and findings. With everybody, for free.

Continue reading if you want to learn more, and if you want to contribute to the study.

In the manufacturing industry, it is normal to have machines break down. Therefore, companies invest in preventive maintenance. The same would be the case if you were working with actual people, who either get sick or go on planned holiday. Sometimes these breakdowns can be foreseen and planned for, but in some cases it cannot. During these unforeseen scenarios, in most cases companies would need to quickly come up with a plan B as to how their new plan would look like.

From an ERP perspective, this would cause a downtime to your resources, leaving you no choice but to either reschedule your operation earlier or later or if possible, reassign it to another resource. This blog post deals with exactly that scenario, and shows you to get to that plan B in a both effective and efficient manner.

When thinking of production scheduling, especially when it comes to an advanced software, many people imagine a magic button, that when pressed would magically optimize the production schedule. This is not what we offer with the VAPS, the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

This blog post outlines why this is the case, and why we consciously decided against that magic button.

Instead, to stay in the analogy of magicians, we thought of "muggle planners" and which concrete instruments would help them to do a very targeted "magic" to their schedule. Hence, the VAPS comes with a plethora of magic instruments. We call them scheduling instruments and they are meant to help solve very concrete scheduling challenges.

There’s no doubt we are in “strange” times, right? We all had to adapt, both personal and professionally speaking. Large events were canceled or postponed. Even the Olympics were deferred to 2021. Luckily for us, on the IT side of life, most of our events are migrating to online hosting, like Directions 4 Partners n this week. At NETRONIC, we embraced this spontaneous change by hosting our own virtual event, which we named next by NETRONIC. The idea of our "next" events is to talk about topics, rather than to demo products.

Our first session, back in May covered visual advanced production scheduling. We invited experts and the audience to take part in a session to talk about the main hurdles when it comes to production scheduling in Business Central and how to overcome them.

We had fun organizing and moderating our first session that we felt delighted with the idea of bringing up session 2. This time we discussed the constant battle between production planning & scheduling. And here is our takeaway!

As we like to remind users, the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler is the first finite capacity manufacturing scheduler for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Among others, it enhances the standard manufacturing module of Business Central by handling all machine and work centers as if their capacity always equals one (1).

If being finite is not enough reason for you to bet on it, in this blog I will briefly explain 6 further features that make the VAPS an advanced scheduler. These are added solutions to other most common challenges on the shop floor and its management. 

These are the earliest material availability date, production simulations, consideration of alternative machine centers, incorporation of a standby resource, the sales order view and the opportunity to see your schedule in regards to your preferred information, or as we call them color views.

Let’s dive into each feature, shall we?

The Visual Advanced Production Scheduler, which you already might know as VAPS was a product we started working on around middle of 2019 in collaboration with our friends from TecMan from the UK.

The VAPS is the first finite capacity visual scheduler fully integrated into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. As such, the VAPS is the big brother of the Visual Production Scheduler (VPS), which you probably already know about. Although both products work with Business Central’s manufacturing module, they are still quite different.

The Visual Production Scheduler (VPS) has been our signature software since 2013. With the experience from more than 300 VPS customers using Microsoft Dynamics NAV, we knew that there are a lot of manufacturing clients that have higher scheduling requirements as what can get fulfilled with the standard Dynamics NAV, respectively Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central functionality.

For this reason, we very consciously decided for a two-pronged approach when we transferred our IP from Dynamics NAV to Dynamics 365 Business Central. On the one hand, we rebuilt the Visual Production Scheduler to prove customers with an easy-to-use visual drag & drop front-end to standard Business Central manufacturing. On the other hand, we started the development of the “bigger brother” to the VPS, which we named VAPS – Visual Advanced Production Scheduler.

The idea was, and is, to enhance the Business Central manufacturing module by those functions that the standard seems to lack, and that larger manufacturers require to better run their shops.

As of today, both the VPS and the VAPS are available on AppSource for Dynamics 365 Business Central addressing to improve the same module: Manufacturing. Then, what are the main differences between these two extensions?

Scheduling is no easy job. You need to match a production order to available machine times, skilled resources, required material, and a few other variables. An ERP, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is perfect for gathering the information you need to start scheduling. The issue being: Business Central displays all information as tables or within tables. There’s a great search field and filter functionality on top that eases the data hunt. But it would be simpler to see it in one view.

Who hasn’t heard the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words”? Well, that’s basically our motto. At NETRONIC, our goal is to turn your production schedule into a dynamic visual. As you may know, we accomplish that using Gantt charts. But we work to boost up the contributions of a Gantt chart for project, resource and production planners. How would you benefit from having a Visual Scheduler? Allow me to explain...