Visual Scheduling Blog

In spite of the steadily growing automation, many small companies still plan their orders manually. Ideally, they use an interactive planning board for scheduling support. In this case, the order backlog (also called order pool or stock of orders) is an important part of this planning board. We have different ways to visualize this backlog for our customers, the presentation depending on whether the orders consist of several sub orders or not, e.g. For all of you dealing with Gantt charts and manual planning I have summed up four visualization versions.

A new version of the Visual Service Scheduler, our add-in for visual service order planning with Dynamics NAV, is available. Several new features further support you in precisely and comfortably scheduling and dispatching your service orders.

As always, the description of all new features and fixed bugs can be found in the release notes. 

See below what we've come up with.

As user of and/or partner reselling our Visual Service Scheduler Gantt add-in for service planning with Dynamics NAV you probably are already familiar with its visual alerts indicating situations that might jeopardize the execution of your order according to schedule.

For some NAV users these visual alerts were not enough, however, so that several of our partners asked us for a way to implement visual signals for highlighting a resource's unavailability such as specific "downtimes", absences, and external blockades. Their wish was our command so that today I can show you how to highlight absences by individual colors and tooltips and, as a side-effect, gain better resource utilization with NAV.

In my last blog posts we dove into the best features to highlight when presenting the Visual Production and Jobs Schedulers. In this post, I want to take the same kind of look, highlighting the three top features to show when demoing their little brother - the Visual Service Scheduler.

This blog post will dive specifically into the Visual Service Scheduler for Dynamics NAV and it most loved features during demos.

Over the past year, a great deal of work went into optimization and enhancement of our Gantt chart add-in for visual service planning in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Service Module, the Visual Service Scheduler (VSS).

Of course, these comprehensive modifications and enhancements also have to be reflected in the add-in's documentation. This is why we have done a profound overhaul of the entire VSS manual, formerly known as "Quick Start Guide". Naturally, with the modifications being so comprehensive, the guide also became more and more extensive, stopped being a mere start-up aid and instead became a "full-grown" manual.

This blogpost wants to inform you about the new manual being available for download on our website as of now while at the same time give you a short review of some of the most important features having been added to the VSS.

There is a dispatch board in Microsoft Dynamics NAV for helping planners allocate service orders to resources. As a matter of fact, however, allocating is not really done via the board but via an editing method carried out in different successive dialogs. To make this easier for the planner, the Visual Service Scheduler (VSS) sums up all information that is needed for dispatching purposes in ONE overview. The recently released new version of the VSS comes with four new functions making it even more comfortable to allocate service item lines to resources in NAV.

The Visual Service Scheduler (VSS) is a visual dispatch board both for the service and the resource planning module in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, helping planners allocate service orders to the service technicians. The visual Gantt add-in enables shifting Service Item Lines per drag & drop from an order backlog to the resources while at the same time the planner keeps control of the resources‘ schedule. This blogpost is about a function of the VSS which allows for an easy overview of not yet allocated orders which will be especially helpful for companies with lots of service orders.

The customer is king - this slogan is of upmost priority to all service-oriented companies.

Knowing the customer’s needs in advance, executing orders in a competent way and in time – these are the challenges a good customer service is confronted with. The service module in Microsoft Dynamics NAV offers every function to optimize the service management. Really every function? What is missing is the good old planning board for staff scheduling, helping to keep track of the complete team’s work and to allocate service orders manually.

This is why this blogpost is about a simple way of closing the gap: by using a Gantt add-in.