Visual Scheduling Blog

Are you struggling to find the easiest way to manage your production schedule? Through our clients, we have seen a long list of scheduling “solutions” that may sound familiar to you. Let me list a couple: Corkboards with tacks, whiteboards, Trello, the famous Excel spreadsheet, and most likely now some sort of "ERP scheduler" if you have been using Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Independent of which tool you use: If you are a production planner, chances are high you may struggle with keeping up your scheduling, and you may not know where to start (as there is so much to take into account when getting into a new ERP). 

There is no one to blame. The combination of ERP and scheduling is far from being trivial, most manufacturing companies vary, and getting used to a new procedure can be overwhelming. In this blog, we will share with you the proven 5 steps and the tasks you need for a smooth start into production scheduling (and its mastering).

If you are reading this blog post, you already know the difficulties of scheduling your production purely with standard Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central. Working on a proper schedule is so difficult. Typically, you get lost in all these open tables that are required to get all information needed. Let’s not forget to mention the difficulties to understand the grand scheme of things when you change data. Not to speak of getting this bigger picture by comparing the impact of data changes. The fact that many NAV and Business Central users regard this task as very tedious was, by the way, confirmed by the data that comes from our State of Business Central & Manufacturing Report.

In this blog post, I shed a light on how you can ease this task with production scheduling extensions and add-ins. While doing so, I also elaborate on the differences between purely manual drag & drop production scheduling and automatic scheduling based on scheduling rules

Inarca SpA, a company based in Vigodarzere in Padua Italy, has been designing and developing connectors, terminals, connection technologies, and machines for electric connections (parts you find in washing machines, cars, etc.) since 1964. The company boasts 200+ patents and manufacture more than 7000 different products. Some of the products are used as components to some of the largest multinational companies in the world. 

The company found managing a high number of employees and a wide assortment of products as a big challenge. For them, it was very crucial to take into consideration different activities that could affect their resources, such as; capacity and scheduled machine maintenance. These activities are factors that determine the smooth and timely execution of their projects.

The German manufacturing company Winter + Freis replaced their "analog" production planning with an ERP system and realized that a graphical planning board was needed in addition to make their processes more transparent and thus provide more planning security for their employees.

Read in this blog post how the Visual Production Scheduler made this happen.

A few weeks ago, we released version 1.10 of both the Visual Production Scheduler and the Visual Jobs Scheduler as well as version 1.5 of the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. So far, we have been following the practice that every release version included the following: (a) new features, (b) bug fixes, and (c) some "under-the-hood"-improvements (merely targeting further improved stability and performance). 

With the current release, we enhanced this practice. We added events and functions to that list. In other words: we made the first steps to make our scheduling extensions extensible. Continue reading to learn about the why, the what, and the how of making extensions extensible.

When thinking about a blog topic and knowing I wanted to write something about visual project planning, I came across a lot of internet articles about the typical reasons why numerous projects fail. While there seem to be a number of somehow "personal" or "subjective" reasons for project failure, like a project manager doing everything on his/her own or poor communication within the team, there are also enough more tangible, objective ones, such as dependency and/or resource conflicts, etc. 

Because it's obvious that no software or tool can help people to overcome the "subjective" reasons that prevent them from successfully completing a project, in my article I'll focus on the more objective reasons and how to overcome them by using the ERP system Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central together with a graphical planning board. 

A few months ago, I shared with you, on the one hand, my frustration about the lack of generally available market data about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Not only, but especially when it comes to manufacturing. On the other hand, I also announced that I volunteered to contribute to closing the gap. This is done now. It is achieved via the State of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Manufacturing Report. 

The report is the result of an extensive market survey that was conducted in the time from November 2020 to the end of January 2021. It is meant to provide statistically relevant market data about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (and Dynamics NAV) and the degree it adopted and used by both manufacturing companies and partners selling to manufacturing clients. Hence, it shows findings from both surveying customers and partners - and from having received a whopping number of 318 responses. You can download the State of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Manufacturing Report here.

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).