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Production Orders

Production orders already carry their own logic in Business Central: routing lines, work and machine center allocations, and the calculations that tie every step together. What BC does not give the planner is a picture. The FastTrack solution for production orders supplies that picture, putting routing on the planning board where it can be seen, dragged, and rescheduled while every BC rule still holds. In practice it does three things:

  • Visualize and plan routing lines via drag and drop, using and respecting all the BC business logic.
  • Create resources in Dime.Scheduler from the standard BC work center and machine center tables.
  • Update the category or time marker of the planned task in Dime.Scheduler automatically when the production order status changes, so a glance at the board tells you where each order stands.

Setup​

Fast track wizard

The wizard turns the solution on and decides how status is surfaced.

Enable production orders solution​

Select Enable Production Routing planning to turn on the FastTrack solution.

Configure production orders​

In Show Order Status as, choose how Dime.Scheduler should reflect a production order status change made in BC on the planned task(s). You can drive either the category or the time marker, or leave it blank if you don't want the order status shown at all.

The video below shows this setting in action. It uses service orders, but the capability is the same for this module:

Usage​

Watch the video below for a short introduction to this module in Dime.Scheduler:

Actions​

The default actions on this page have been extended.

List Actions​

See common actions for an overview of the list actions for this type.

Card actions​

Two actions are added to the production order card: Send order and Delete order.

Production Order

Creating production orders​

The flow is straightforward. Create a production order, run the send to Dime.Scheduler action, and the connector gathers everything about the order and its work items and ships it across. Three entities make the trip:

  • Production orders
  • Production order lines
  • Production order routing lines

Dime.Scheduler keeps the relationship between an order and its lines intact, mapping each level onto its own record type. The production order is captured at the Job level, the production order line at the Task level, and each production order routing line becomes an Appointment. When an order has several lines, those lines all link back to the same job, so once they are planned they still trace to the production order they came from.

Here is where this module parts ways with the others. Sending the order creates the tasks, but the appointments are not yours to place by hand: they are created automatically from within Business Central. Dime.Scheduler leans on the production and routing rules in BC to build the planning, so the moment you send a production order, the appointments are already on the board.

Production orders

Planning production orders​

For the same reason, there are no open tasks waiting in the open tasks grid for you to drag onto the board. Business Central already knows which machine and work centers are allocated to each task, so Dime.Scheduler simply visualizes the planning that BC produced rather than asking you to assemble it.

That link runs both ways. Because each production order routing line corresponds directly to an appointment, moving an appointment is handed straight back to the production routing engine in Business Central, which validates the change and recalculates the rest of the order routing when it needs to. In the example below, shifting one appointment ripples through the other steps in the production order.

Resource allocation

In short, Dime.Scheduler keeps standard Business Central functionality in charge and adds visual scheduling on top of it.