The Visual Production Sequencer is a visualization aid for production planning. It shows individual production orders per resource as a bar in a Gantt chart. This Gantt chart shows all selected resources and, for each resource, the corresponding production order number, its description, and total throughput time in hours. The bar itself shows the throughput time as per the time period (date and time) of the production order.
Date/time
The date/time part of the Gantt chart consists of white and blue parts. The white part corresponds to the time a resource is available for production. The blue part is the time of day that falls outside this time frame, that is, the time when the resource is not available for production.
Calendar
Operating hours for resources are determined by shop calendars at the location, resource group, and resource level. You can determine whether the location value or the resource group value takes precedence when no settings are made on the individual resource.
When no shop calendar is set up at either the location, resource group, or resource level, the Visual Production Sequencer fails to load.
Checks on moving production orders
The Visual Production Sequencer lets you drag and drop production orders through time or, if the setup is correct, from one resource to another. Dragging and dropping is straightforward but also executes several checks:
Is the resource to which the production order is dragged part of the BOM that led to this production order (that is, is the production order valid for this resource)?
Is the resource to which the production order is dragged in the same location as the order itself?
If either check fails, the system shows an error and refuses to move the production order.
Additional checks
In addition, the system performs several checks on the time span of production:
Does the production order start in normal operating hours?
Is the production order allowed to run into overtime, and if so, how many minutes?
Is the production order allowed to stop at the end of a day and resume the next day?
If several shifts are set up in the shop calendar, is the production order allowed to cross from one shift into the next?
Non-production events
You can also create or show non-production events in the Visual Production Sequencer. A non-production event is time needed to change or clean machinery. This time is therefore not available as production time. Examples of non-production events are cleaning operations and production changeovers. You can drag non-production events through time on the same day, but you cannot move them to another day. If that is required, create a new non-production event. You also cannot drag non-production events to another resource. A non-production event belongs to the resource on which it was created. If you need to move such an event, delete it from its original resource and create it on the new resource.
Automatic rescheduling
For a given list of production orders that belong to the same resource, you can run an automatic rescheduling. This leaves the first production order in place and moves the subsequent orders in time so that no spare time exists between the selected production orders.
Reordering production orders
You can also change the order in which production orders are shown. This is useful when a number of orders need to be sorted in a specific way. You can sort manually by selecting the lines and using the Edit button to view details and sort on the columns shown. You can also use the Reorder button, which uses a customer-specific codeunit to sort the lines in a specific way.