Enhance Visual Production Planning in NAV by customizing tooltip and label information

In the Visual Production Scheduler, our Gantt add-in for visual production scheduling, tasks, resources, and capacities are displayed along a timeline, thus providing an optimum overview for planners. A visual plan always faces the dilemma of having to show all the information needed for the planner to quickly recognize planning conflicts and intervene while on the other hand avoiding to show too much information to not jeopardize the clarity. This is where the tooltip and bar label come in: Important data is only shown when needed and presented in an understandable way.

Grasping the importance of a meaningful tooltip and bar label, we implemented an enhancement in the last VPS release: The standard NAV information can now be supplemented for each of the VPS objects (PO line, PO routing line, work center, machine center) by equipping up to five internal custom fields with data to use them in tooltip and bar label.

To do this, follow the instructions given in this blog post.

How to proceed

To use five additional fields, only some C/AL code adjustments are needed.

Step #1

Open the C/AL code of the XMLport 5416000 NETRONIC VPS Export and adjust the assignments for the variables as described below. The necessary code lines are already present, but have to be activated:

• POLCustomField 01…05
• PORLCustomField 01…05
• WCCustomField 01…05
• MCCustomField 01…05

Step #2

In the code units 5416015 NETRONIC VPS Tooltip Mgt. and 5416016 NETRONIC VPS Label Mgt. you find the procedures Add*CustomFields for the variables having been defined before. In the procedures, you’ll find some demo code you can activate and adjust to your requirements.

Step #3

Save and compile all your modifications.

Result

The newly defined fields are now available in the “Configuration tooltip and label” menu in the VPS.

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Resource Credit | NETRONIC

Knowing our proven Visual Scheduling Suite for Dynamics NAV (2013 up to 2018) you will be glad to hear that the Visual Production Scheduler for easy production scheduling with interactive Gantt charts, is now available for Dynamics 365 Business Central extension on AppSource.

Together with the simultaneous release of the VJS for Dynamics 365 Business Central and the VRV in May this year, this makes us the company offering the most complete stack of visual scheduling software for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and NAV of which we are really very proud.

Of course, you can rest assured that we didn’t change the basic features or the handling of a proven tool like the VPS so that in this regard the VPS extension has stayed the same in comparison to the VPS add-in for Dynamics NAV. The layout was adapted to Dynamics 365 Business Central and modernized a bit but it is still an essential tool for easily scheduling your manufacturing processes. Here are the 5 basic features of our Visual Production Scheduler extension.

#1 Drag & drop planning of operations

Visually plan production orders, production order lines, and operations by simple mouse actions such as drag & drop. The VPS both supports horizontal movements (i.e. modification of start and end state) and vertical changes (i.e. modification of allocations to work or machine centers).

#2 Fully integrated

As known from our “old” Visual Scheduling Suite, the VPS also fully integrates with Dynamics 365 Business Central. Double-clicking on production orders, for instance, opens the production order card, while double-clicking on a work center correspondingly opens the work center card where you can navigate and make changes as usual.

#3 Automatic scheduling of successors and predecessors

When operations that are part of a production order are moved, the successors and predecessors can be automatically shifted with them while at the same time the float time is always minimized. This can be done with both sequential and parallel options.

#4 Show capacity information

The Visual Production Scheduler is not just an interactive Gantt chart. Apart from the time-related position of production orders and their allocation to resources it also shows the workload of the resources. Exceeding resource capacities are indicated by a visual warning so that you can react immediately. This way, you can keep dates and capacities in check at any time.

#5 Easy navigation

The Visual Production Scheduler offers lots of comfortable options for easily navigating your plan: jump to the time now line with one click, zoom into a period by mouse-wheel, jump back to your starting position and much more.

Contact allonline365 to speak to a consultant about NETRONIC on  +27 (21) 205 3650 or  info@allonline365.com.

www.allonline365.com

Resource Credit | NETRONIC

It’s been a while since I provided you with some news and information about our add-ins. At the moment, we are quite busy with developing our Visual Scheduling Suite 2.0 – based on JavaScript and fully applicable for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (and NAV), for cloud and on-premise.

But, of course, we don’t neglect our “good old” proven Dynamics NAV add-ins for visual scheduling and a question that was brought to me recently was how to work with linked production orders in the Visual Production Scheduler. This question can be answered easily and quickly – and as I’m sure many of you would like to know how this is done, I’m going to share the solution with you today.

The well-known link options – a quick reminder

Let’s have a quick look at the well-known options first.

Case #1

Links can be shown between operations of one production order line – coming from the respective routing. They can be sequential (as shown below) or parallel.

Case #2

Visualizations of links of the different production order lines within one production order when the item is defined as “make to order“.

New option – linking production orders

Since the last release of the VPS, even links between production orders can be shown. This requires two steps.

Step #1 Enable the according option in the “Setup” dialog

Step #2 Reserve the needed amounts in the according (firm planned) production order

Let’s imagine you have three production orders (and in the according BOMs you have defined the needed components):

• one for a bicycle (101008), needing the front wheel
• one for a front wheel (101010), needing the hub
• one for a hub (101011)

For creating links between the three production orders, you now have to make the according reservations. Let’s start with reserving the needed amount of front hubs against your front wheel production order (101010):

• Click “Available to Reserve” in the “Edit Reservation” dialog (to open it, click “Functions > Reserve” in the “Lines” area of the production order card)

• The dialog popping up now shows how much items you can reserve against which production order:

• For reserving, click “ACTIONS’, “Reserve”. After having done so, you will see that 20 of your produced hubs are now reserved against production order 101010 (front wheel).

• Repeat these steps for the front wheels.

Result

After having completed all reservations, the VPS shows the dependencies of all three production orders by dashed lines:

For having modifications of one production order impact also the linked production orders, activate “Schedule across Production Order Lines” in the “Setup” dialog:

If in our example, you now postpone the hub production order, all dependent production orders will also be postponed accordingly.

Find out more about NETRONIC’s Visual Production Scheduler capabilities. Contact allonline365 on  +27 (21) 205 3650 or  info@allonline365.com.

www.allonline365.com

Resource Credit | NETRONIC