Enhanced Reservations in Business Central

I was catching up on the features in new releases of Business Central and I came across this enhancement.

 

 

The Description is Suggest Next Steps for Sales and Production Orders which intrigued me because as far as I know there’s no “Steps” workflow that I’ve seen.

 

It turns out that this feature lets you see at a glance  “Reserved from Stock” status that has been added to the different kinds of DEMAND orders.  

 

If you want to understand DEMAND vs SUPPLY I recorded a video called Supply Chain 101 that you can find here

 

 

This led me to two main thoughts I wanted to share.

 

1) Microsoft added a Reservation Worksheet. This is a great new feature.  Reservation management is always annoying, and with this new “Reserved from Stock” data even Microsoft admits it would be really hard without a new tool to make Reservations easier to manage,

 

2) Now that orders have the Reserved from Stock available to them, that means we can leverage that data for better visual reporting.  Business Central supports color coding data (you can see red and yellow data in the Reservation Worksheet (see above).  It is “Easy” for a developer to add code to highlight colors in lists like the Firm/Planned Production Order list or in the Sales Order list.  

 

I think we can leverage the three values of FULL, PARTIAL and NONE to create a Green, Yellow and Red highlighting on these lists that are looking up the Reserved from Stock form.

 

For customers using dynamics 365 Business Central manufacturing modules, the use of clear color coding to make it a lot easier to see visually which Production Orders or Sales Orders have been allocated and therefore which are ready for processing would be a great addition.

 

I think I’ll be looking into this a bit more and see if my developers can add this functionality for me.