Scheduling visually #D365FO #D365SCM #Dynamics #Manufacturing

Recently, I had a client ask about the Visual scheduling tool in D365. Initially, I had fairly low hopes. I had not touched the Gantt chart in Dynamics in quite awhile, but I remembered it being super simplified, not very intuitive, and not extremely user friendly. While I do not necessarily see this being a game changer in D365 manufacturing implementations, I was pleasantly surprised when I actually dug into this feature in the latest releases. There some really good videos out there, like this one from Johan Hoffman of Microsoft:

Major highlights of this functionality are:

1. Ability to view production orders that are job scheduled (key point there), jobs from planned production orders, and jobs scheduled from project activities of type Hour Forecasts
2. Configurable views, colors, and timescales.
3. Drag and drop scheduling (limited to rescheduling on the same resource and one job at a time)
4. Manual scheduling based on scheduling date and time (forward and backward from scheduling date or forward from material availability date).
5. The ability to view by order or by resource
6. Icons/visuals for material shortages, material availability, order delivery dates, and capacity.

If you need a simple visual of backlog and scheduled plans for a given machine or work area, this is a great tool to work side by side with the Capacity load and Capacity reservations forms available on the resources and production jobs currently.

Some people like columns, rows, and data…. and some like visuals. I think this is a step in the right direction.