Visual Scheduling Blog

As announcend in my last week's blog about the new features of the Visual Production Scheduler here comes the introduction of the enhancements of the VJS, our interactive planning app for visualizing jobs, job tasks, job planning lines and resources. Due to the summer break, I skipped the blog about the July release and now present you with the new developments of both the July and the August release.

Along with minor improvements and fixed bugs, the VJS has some nice new features to offer that you can look forward to. 

The so called Jobs module of Microsoft Dynamics NAV is designed for companies with largely project-based business (like engineering or construction companies) to gain better control of their projects. Since the ERP system’s module seems to focus more on the aspects of financial project controlling rather than on the requirements of a day-to-day project management, I’d like to outline in this blog post how you can easily enhance your NAV 2018 system with interactive Gantt charts to facilitate a graphical drag & drop project planning.

If you search for getting tips about how to build a professional project plan, you'll find many useful posts and articles.

In nearly all of them you will stumble across milestones. Setting milestones is generally considered as indispensable when it comes to gain successful project delivery. 

'So, that's all very well', you may think, 'but I'm a Dynamics NAV user and NAV doesn't offer any milestones'.

In today's blog I'll show you how to work around this shortfall - read how to create and use milestones in the Jobs Module of NAV. Furthermore, you will see how to visualize your milestones in the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project planning in Dynamics NAV, to gain further planning agility and clarity.

As user or reseller of Microsoft Dynamics NAV you are well aware of the fact that working with the proven tool for (not only) simplifying the management of projects, tasks, and resources can sometimes be a bit cumbersome and time-consuming. You also know our Visual Jobs Scheduler (VJS) add-in and have already discovered some of its handy functions for reducing or even bypassing some of these behaviors in NAV.

With this blogpost I'd like to draw your attention to a simple technique that already exists in NAV and will, when used together with the VJS, make the planning much more agile:

See how to rapidly create new jobs by using templates and afterwards fine-tune the new jobs' timing and resource planning by drag and drop in the VJS:

In this post, Mercurius IT’s Operations Director, Lee Cridland, speaks to NETRONIC about his experiences of production and project task scheduling at Siemens and job scheduling at Mercurius IT, as well as provides insights into what good scheduling looks like.

A new release of version 1.4 of the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project planning in Dynamics NAV, is available. Several new features will further support you in precisely and comfortably planning your projects.

As always, the description of all new features and fixed bugs can be found in the release notes. I also recommend this video where some selected features can be watched in action.

And here is what we have worked out for you:

As you already know, the release of version 1.4 of the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project scheduling with NAV, came with lots of new features that, due to the wealth of information, I'm introducing to you step by step. Last week you learned about milestones for better managed project execution and today I continue by describing a function of  the Visual Jobs Scheduler that will effectively help you keeping track of the time units consumed for your project - either during the project or after having finished it - and thus letting you promptly intervene if something is not as it should be or analyze where something went wrong.

I hope you enjoyed the Christmas season, started well into the new year and could recharge your batteries so that now you are eager to learn more about the mighty new features of  version 1.4 of the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project planning in Dynamics NAV. 

Today I'll be writing about the usage of milestones, this also being a feature many of you have asked us about. So, as your wishes are our commands we added them to the VJS.

Most likely you will all be quite busy with the work that the beginning of a new year always brings about and so I kept this blog short - but nevertheless substantial.