Visual Production Scheduler 

Release Notes

Visual Production Scheduler

We consider product maintenance just as important as the development of new features & products. Our regular service releases offer our customers constantly revised versions of our products, comprising updates, bug fixes and product enhancements. This is a free service for customers with a valid support & maintenance agreement. 

No longer supported Dynamics version

• Version 1.5 of the Visual Production Scheduler does NO longer support version 2009 R2 of Dynamics NAV. Version 1.5. is available for all Dynamics NAV versions from Dynamics NAV 2013. Customers who want to use the VPS with Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 need to use the build 1.4.5.3.
  
  

List of enhancements – including all changes since release 1.4.5.3

• New search dialog enabling to search for a certain text within a list of the production order lines. The dialog dynamically gets filtered by records with the entered search text. When double clicking on one of these records, the dialog closes and the view directly scrolls to the first operation of this production order line. In the XMLport “NETRONIC VPS Export” a new field “POLSearchText” was added on production order line level, by which a partner can extend the text information shown in this dialog and which is included in the search and filter function so that customer specific information can be included in the search dialog.

• Consider queue time: the VPS now enables considering the queue time in the scheduling algorithm The queue time is stored in the machine/work center and operates on the calendar of the relevant machine/work center. The feature can be enabled in the VPS setup.

• A warning symbol can be shown in case of a sequence violation. By this a bar gets a yellow warning sign if e.g., the succeeding operation starts earlier than the queue time would allow. This option can be activated in the “Setup dialog”.

• The “Setup” dialog was enhanced by options to disable the dialogs popping up in case of a sequence violation, moving an operation that has already started, successful saving, and restoring initial values.

• A new dialog for named “Data Filters” was added (similar to the named “View Filters”) so that the user can create multiple data filters and switch between them.

• The new option “Show Data filter at startup” in the “Setup" dialog, lets the user decide whether the Data Filter dialog should pop up on every start of the VPS so that the data filter can be dynamically changed on every start.

• The last active view can now also be specified to be the startup view. For this, the “Setup” dialog was enhanced accordingly.

• The coloring of the progress bar was adjusted. If the operation is in progress, the progress bar will be grey as before. If the operation is finished, the bar will get black. If the progress calculation states a progress of >100% the progress bar will get red.

• Certain UI user settings are saved while working with the VPS. When reopening the VPS, these settings are considered. By that, the next time a user opens the VPS the “Show Progress” and the “Show/Hide non-working times” settings are kept from the last session. The same applies to the height of the histogram area which can be adjusted by dragging the sash between the diagram area and the histogram area.

• Additional UI user values “ZoomFactor” (changeable via Ctrl + +/- or Ctrl + mouse wheel) and “UnitWidth” (the time resolution of the timescale, changeable via mouse wheel when hovering with the mouse over the timescale) to be saved so they can be reloaded and set after the VPS gets restarted.

• The VPS now offers a full French translation.

• Option to add custom context menu entries to production order routing lines. To make use of it you need to set the values “PORLCustomContextMenu01Text” and “PORLCustomContextMenu01ID” on production order routing line level inside of the XMLport “NETRONIC VPS Export”. After this, the PORLCustomContextMenu01Text will be part of the context menu of an operation. When the user clicks on it, the new event “CustomContextMenuEntryClicked” (2070) will be triggered with the information on which operation this happened.

• The option to support multiselection was added. This can be activated by setting the “MultiSelectEnabled” value in the user setup table to TRUE. By that a user can select multiple operations at once and move them together to another point in time. As this could have a heavy impact on the complete schedule, an automatic scheduling of predecessors and successors does not happen. This needs to be explicitly activated by the “MultiMoveWithSchedule” option in the user setup table. If this option is set to TRUE, linked operations of operations will be scheduled as well in case the user has moved multiple operations at once.

• A custom due date line on production order line level can be added. To make use of this, the “POLCustomDueDateDT” and “POLCustomDueDateColor” values on production order line level inside of the XMLport “NETRONIC VPS Export” needs to be set.

• A new VPSObjectsMarked event was added. This event gets triggered when the user selects one or multiple operations inside of the VPS.

• New function MarkVPSObjects, by which the partner can mark certain VPS objects, like the indicator functionality, and thus set the font and/or the background colors of bars according to his own business logic. Sample code for this was added for the use case that all operations belonging to the same production order get highlighted in yellow when the user clicks on an operation.

• Option to use the VPS as an automatically updating “Shop Floor Plan” which can be put on a screen on the shop floor, and which shows the current and upcoming operations planned on the shown machines. This can be achieved by making use of the following additional setup parameters:

  • “AutoUpdateInterval” (time after which the VPS automatically does an update of the shown data)

  • “AutoScrollInterval” (time after which the VPS automatically scrolls the diagram in time to have the current date/time e.g., always in the center of the view)

  • “ShowTimeLine” & “TimeLineUpdateInterval” (shows the current date/time as a dateline and defines how often this line should be updated.)

To get a shop floor plan for a certain machine, the customer needs to create a dynamics user which is used for the dynamics client run besides this machine. For this user they can set the data filter to load only this machine center (Make sure that the option “Show partial Prod. Order Lines” is activated). Set the AutoUpdateInterval e.g., to 5 minutes, the AutoScrollInterval and TimeLineUpdateInterval to 30 seconds, and ShowTimeLine to 1.

By that the data gets updated every 5 minutes, but the diagram scrolls every 30 seconds and updates the current datetime line every 30 seconds as well. By changing the time resolution to show e.g., 3 hours you can move the diagram in a way that you will always see what has happened in the last half hour and what will come up in the next 2,5 hours.

• In the XMLport “NETRONIC VPS Export” we added CustomTableText fields to the Work Center, Machine Center and Prod. Order Line objects so that a partner can adjust the text shown in the table section of the VPS.

• Additional styles for showing text on operations: Especially in combination with the shop floor view, it is useful to always see the full text on an operation rather than having it truncated at the end of the bar. The new settings that were added to the user table are:

  • “POViewTextLayerType”

  • “ResViewTextLayerType” .

They can have the following values:

• • - 0: (=FromStartToEnd which is the standard mode)

  • - 1: (=FromStartUnlimited which will show the text beginning at the start date of the bar and will not be truncated at the end.)

  • - 2: (=FromEndUnlimited which will show the text beginning at the end date of the bar)

• Via the indicator or MarkVPSObjects functionality, it is now possible to set the background color and font color of work Center and machine Centers in the table section as well.

List of fixed bugs

• When reading Prod. Order Capacity Needs, we filter out values without start/end times. This
  caused issues in certain environments.

List of enhancements

• New option in the “Setup” dialog to hide/show histograms for the desired view/s.
• Features to be installed by the partner:
  • Individual setting of the backgroundcolor of production order routing lines during load time.
  • Individual setting of the font color of production order routing lines during load time.

List of fixed bugs

• Changed saving order to better support reservations between production order lines.

List of enhancements

• Available for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (on premises).
• Similar to displaying and processing links between production order lines now also links between production orders are shown ( this requiring according entries in the “Reservation Entry” table).
• New options in the “Setup” dialog:
  • “Show partial Prod. Order Lines”: Up to now, the VPS has only visualized complete PO lines so that the predecessor/successor links were still shown and used for the calculation. If, by setting filters, a single operation of a PO line was filtered out, this resulted in hiding the complete PO line. This behavior can now be disabled by the new option enabling also parts of a PO line to be shown.
  • “Startup view”: The user can select the view being shown when the VPS is started.
• Multiple view filters can be created, named and stored.
• Improved performance regarding setting and deleting indicators.
• Update of the VPS-JS to version 1.5.2
• The partner can
  • For each of the VPS objects (PO line, PO routing line, work center, machine center) equip 5 internal custom fields with data for using them in tooltip or bar label.
  • Activate the feature “Autosched direct parallel OPs” so that operations being situated “directly parallel towards each other” will be included in the automatic scheduling.

List of fixed bugs

• In some cases the progress of an operation wasn’t calculated correctly.
• Hiding work-free periods didn’t work reliably.
• An error ocurred in the BOM view upon processing quantities with decimal places.
• Sometimes, moving a node caused a crash when a link was drawn through the node while moving it.

List of enhancements

• Available for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

List of fixed bugs

• No fixed bugs in this release.

List of enhancements

• Customizable conflict processing when saving (1)
  (Up to now, all operations from the VPS were checked against the current NAV data on saving and in case of a conflict the user was informed by a warning. Now the conflict processing can be configured to only check the modified VPS operations or to perform no check at all.)
• Customizable conflict processing when saving (2)
  (Up to now all operations were recalculated at their current position by way of trial on saving to check whether their durations were modified due to changed calendars or capacity information. Checking this calendar/capacity information can now be customized and is deactivated initially.)
• In the Production Order View operations can be sorted by operation number now.
• New data fields for bar label and tooltip are available.
• Processing bin management information on changing a capacity was added.
• Saving debug information was extended by further data.

List of fixed bugs

• In case of conflicts, conflict processing didn’t update all VPS data correctly.
• When indicators were used and the bar label went over several lines, not all lines got an indicator.
• The VPS wasn’t updated correctly after reloading data together with saving.
• The error warning that was shown by mistake on opening the BOM in NAV 2017, doesn’t appear any longer.
• The missing item concerning the VPS JavaScript Viewer was added to the menu.