The graphical part of the schedule

The elements of the graphical part in detail

Bars

Each production order routing line/operation of a production order is represented by a bar that is either colored or white. The colored area of a bar indicates that this timespan is during the work time of the underlying machine center. The white area of a bar indicates that this timespan is during the non-work time of the underlying machine center (also see below "Calendar". The bar color depends on the selected color scheme (see below). 

The following information can be gathered from optical indicators:

• Currently marked operation

• Operation changed but not saved yet 

• Violated due date

• Pinned operations
  The operations context menu allows to pin operations so that they can't be moved.

• • Pin operation without consuming capacity

• • Pin operation consuming capacity

• • Link violation after having pinned an operation. The picture below shows that the predecessor of a pinned operation was moved behind this operation
    
    

• Setup times

  The setup times can be visualized as light grey section at the beginning of the bar.  

  

  You can switch between showing or hiding the setup times by a menu item:

  

  The color representing the setup time can be easily specified in the VAPS color settings:

• Display mode for overlapping operations

Usually, overlapping operations are shown in an "optimized" way, meaning that the resource row with the respective operations gets extended in height so that the operations are completely visible. Since the VAPS schedules with finite capacity, overlapping operations are avoided, and hence this is a rare case.

However, some customers have contacted us with the following use case: They need to create operations with a length of zero to define a common starting point for parallel routings without blocking capacity. These operations will then be scheduled at the first possible position which will result in a very high stacked resource. For these cases, we added two new context menu items so that users can now decide whether overlapping operations are to be shown overlapped in one row or stacked. 

The picture below illustrates the different display modes:

Calendar

The grey and white area in the background visualizes the work and non-work periods of the respective work/machine center. They are derived from the respective shift calendars.

Progress

For production order routing lines of released production orders a progress bar is displayed below the actual bar being based on the posted quantity consumption. The color of the progress bar appears as follows:   

• finished: black

• still in progress: grey

• still in progress but more quantity booked than initially planned: red

Links

Predecessor/successor relations are shown as arrows ("links") between the bars. They are only shown for the production order that is currently selected.

• links between operations of one production order

• links between operations of different production orders if they are linked to each other by reservations (make to order) OR links between production order lines coming from one production order (make to stock)

Workdate

A red vertical line in the chart indicates the workdate, this usually being the current date.

Required due date

The required due date is a specific VAPS field, that you can set on the "Production Order" card:

This date can only be set and changed by the user. We recommend to set this date in case you have hard due dates for one or more specific production orders.

The tooltip

The tootip of the VAPS provides further details about an operation and is customizable.

The "Standby" resource

The standby resource does not exist in your Dynamics 365 Business Central machine centers. It is a virtual machine center that we automatically create in every work center. It contains all production order routing lines/operations that are not yet scheduled from within the VAPS, and hence are just scheduled by the Business Central scheduling run. The standby resource gets highlighted by a yellow background (and an infitiy symbol next to its name in the table part):

Please note that

• the standby resource always is treated as a resource with infinite capacity
• all other machine centers are treated as finite capacity resources (with a capacity of 1)