Visual Scheduling Blog

Version 1.5 of both the Visual Production Scheduler and the Visual Jobs Scheduler have been released as of lately. These releases don't offer as many new features as you may be accustomed to from us, but this doesn't mean, of course, that we have been idle. On the contrary, to further improve our products and offer you the best possible user experience we decided that in this release we would do a lot of streamlining and consequently have strongly focused on product maintenance in the form of bugfixing and performance improvement.

For you and me, this means that we have more space and time to deal with the main new feature of the VJS and explain it in detail, with a little theoretical excursion into the world of formulas. As always, the complete release information can  be found in the respective notes for VPS and VJS.

I hope you liked the new features of the Visual Production Scheduler I presented you with last week and are now eager to see which functionality we have on offer with the November release of the Visual Jobs Scheduler.

As announced in my blog about the new features of the Visual Production Scheduler, here comes the introduction to the innovations that have been implemented with the October release of the VJS. Look forward to some comfortable and powerful new features!

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.