Visual Scheduling Blog

This is the 10th episode of the Business Central Manufacturing Show. This week, I spoke with Christophe Billard, who is from France, but lives and works in Spain. After working as a business demand planner and in supply chain management for pharmaceutical and FMCG companies, Christophe became an ERP consultant 15 years ago. Since then has helped many manufacturing companies to fully embrace the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. In our conversation, we looked at best practices when implementing an ERP, getting started with MRP, and introducing an MES. Throughout this round-trip, Christophe's advice for manufacturing companies stayed consistent: do not try to take it all. Instead, start small with balanced information, before you then unleash the power of these systems by constant fine-tuning. He repeated this advice when we looked at the similarities of a successful wrestler and a successful manufacturing company.

Are you a production planner working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central? Or, are you a manufacturer assessing the use of Business Central? This is for you!

We’ve repeatedly heard planners asking for the best way to evaluate the impact on squeezing a rush order into the published schedule. Or wondering how to accelerate the rescheduling process of production orders when a machine breaks down, or an operation takes longer than expected. Some planners mentioned their struggle identifying bottlenecks. If you feel like you can relate, then you’re on the right path to fixing it.

For episode #9 of the Business Central Manufacturing Show, I met Mike Fontaine from Canada. He is a solutions expert at VOX ISM, and has 20+ years of experience with ERP software and manufacturing. Actually, Mike used to work with manufacturing companies as a buyer, a scheduler, and a production planner. After spending some minutes on the experiences that Mike gained working for manufacturers (quote: "I actually was the MRP system of the company"), we found ourselves chatting about scheduling. Interestingly enough, we did not speak scheduling software, but scheduling concepts. A major lesson learned is: we need to spend more time dealing with scheduling concepts. If we break down scheduling success, it is software PLUS concepts (neither just software nor just concepts). The scheduling concepts we discussed range from "applying how baseball works to scheduling" to the "frozen, slushy and wet schedule". Last, but not least Mike also shared some thoughts on why he is driving the Best Manufacturing Apps Conference (BMAC) 2020.

Michael Hering from Germany was my guest in episode #8 of the Business Central Manufacturing Show. As Industry Manager Concrete, Michael is responsible for COSMO CONSULT's products and solutions for discrete manufacturing. The conversation turned out to become a box of chocolate with manufacturing ERP best practices. We looked into a variety of aspects such as lean management and the IT required for it, artificial intelligence in manufacturing, concrete steps to make when implementing a manufacturing ERP system, and future data strategies if supply chains might become shorter again. Michael provided concrete tips & advice to not only each of these "pieces of chocolate", but to even more pieces.

The Visual Resource Viewer (VRV) was our guinea pig with which we learned how to build visual scheduling extensions for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. In terms of developing software, for us it was a landmark app. It followed our approach to start small, and learn focused. However, a development guinea pig not necessarily translates into a commercial success. In case of the VRV, the market resonance showed that a static (i.e. non-interactive) resource Gantt chart may be great for development (testing) purposes. However, it falls short in providing true customer value. Hence, we retire the Visual Resource Viewer (VRV) with immediate effect.

I met Guus Krabbenborg from The Netherlands for this episode of the Business Central Manufacturing Show. He was my first guest without a dedicated manufacturing background. However, he is a highly-experienced business trainer and consultant with a well-earned reputation in the international Microsoft Dynamics arena. He has managed and co-owned several software companies and was Sales Director for Navision Software in The Netherlands. Guus and I quickly came to the topic of digital transformation, and I learned that transformation is the hardest of the implied challenges. However, Guus didn't end up making this clear in a provocative way. Instead, he gave seven insanely concrete and practical tips of what companies can do to achieve that transformation journey. These tips are not only inspiring, but they are also hands-on and ready-to-go aka ready to get applied. Starting this Friday ;-)

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...

This week, I had the chance to interview Robert Jolliffe, CEO and President of Sabre Limited from Canada. He has been an ERP consultant in the manufacturing space for over 25 years, starting immediately after graduating University of Toronto Engineering. His two uncles and his father owned and operated manufacturing businesses, and hence manufacturing is in his blood. In our conversation, Robert not only explained the phrase "secret sauce" to me, but also made it very obvious, why manufacturers would do wrong if they try to search for the secret sauce of a product such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. However, we did not end up with searching for the secret sauce ... we also looked ahead into industrial revolution number 4 and the return of cottage industries.