Visual Scheduling Blog

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.

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...

The bridge between Business Central's resource utilization tables and your schedule.

What would you buy with $1,500 USD?

You could get a 75” Sony LED screen or a fancy ViewSonic projector for the largest meeting room. You could also buy a Razer Laptop, or… an all-in-one resource view for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Whether your company works with Projects, Services or Assembly, you can gather all information regarding the resources' utilization in a snapshot for just $1,500 USD. We call this solution: the Visual Resource Viewer (VRV).

A few months ago, I presented our Model for Resource Planning HTML5 Gantt Charts in a two-part blog post. Now that we have successfully realized many more projects in the meanwhile it is time to give you an update.

Long-awaited and much-longed for: The Visual Jobs Scheduler (VJS) for easy project and resource planning with interactive Gantt charts is now available as Dynamics 365 Business Central extension on AppSource. As having announced in my last week's blog about the new VPS, I will give you a short tour today.

But first, as we are actually still beaming with pride, let me stress again the fact that with releasing also the VPS and the VRV we are now the company offering the most complete stack of visual scheduling software for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Having said this, let's get you familiar with the new VJS.

You most certainly know our Visual Scheduling Suite for Dynamics NAV (2013 up to 2018). But, of course, we are also "in synch" with the latest developments on the Dynamics 365 Business Central software and are currently in the process of developing our Visual Scheduling Suite 2.0 – based on JavaScript and - fully applicable for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for cloud and on-premises. So far, we've come up with the Visual Resource Viewer for Dynamics 365 Business Central for the cloud that allows managing your resources, their allocations, free or exceeded capacities and absences in one view. 

With this blog post you get a short introduction to our latest "baby" ;-).