Production Planner
Standard Business Central planning assumes infinite capacity. It will happily tell you that eleven jobs can run on Tuesday on a work centre that fits four, and it will not tell you which customer finds out first.
Production Planner is a visual board with the constraint built in. Planners drag a job, watch the knock-on effects land across the following weeks, and see the late order before the customer does.
See the late order weeks before the customer does.
Finite capacity, visible weeks ahead.
- Category
- Planning
The gap it closes
What you live with until you fix it.
- A plan that assumes infinite capacity on finite machines
- Rescheduling done in a spreadsheet beside the ERP
- The knock-on effect of a rush order discovered when the next one is late
- Planners who cannot see past next week
- The real schedule living on a whiteboard by the machine
How it works
4 steps. No clipboard in any of them.
- 01
Load the real constraint
Work centres, shifts and machine capacity as they actually are, not as the routing master data wishes they were.
- 02
Plan on the board
Jobs are dragged onto the timeline. The board refuses to overload a work centre, so the plan you produce is one the plant can actually run.
- 03
Test the what-if
Drop a rush order in and see what it pushes late before you commit to it. The conversation with sales happens before the promise, not after.
- 04
Commit back to Business Central
The accepted schedule writes back to the production orders, so the board and the ledger never disagree.
What’s in it
Features.
- Drag-and-drop schedule board
- Finite capacity per work centre
- What-if rescheduling
- Late-order early warning
Technical specification
Specs.
- Deployment
- Cloud or on-premise
- Scheduling
- Finite capacity, per work centre and shift
- Horizon
- Configurable, typically 4–12 weeks forward
- Write-back
- Committed schedule updates production orders
Who runs it
The floors this was built on.
Proof
What it looks like in practice
- Capacity, against the machines you have
- Finite
- Forward visibility, not days
- Weeks
- Rush orders tested before they are promised
- What-if
“Sales used to promise dates and we would find out on the day. Now the board tells us what a rush order breaks before anyone says yes to it.”
Common questions
Production Planner, answered.
How is this different from standard BC planning?
Standard planning is infinite-capacity by default: it will schedule more work onto a machine than the machine can do. This board plans against the real constraint, and shows it visually rather than as a list of dates.
Does the schedule write back to Business Central?
Yes. Once a planner commits, the production orders are updated, so there is one schedule, not a board and an ERP that disagree.
It was built for mold manufacturing. Does it suit us?
That is where it started, and it is why the constraint handling is as strict as it is. It runs well in any discrete manufacturing plant with real machine bottlenecks.
Start here
See Production Planner on your own data. Not a canned demo.
We will run it against a process you actually have, and tell you plainly whether it earns its licence in your plant. If it does not, that is a useful answer too.