Your First Finite Schedule in SmartFlow APS

This walks through generating, reviewing, and applying your first finite schedule. If you’ve never used SmartFlow before, try it on the built-in demo dataset first — every demo scenario is seeded with a deliberate overload, so you’ll actually see the solver resolve something instead of running against a shop with no conflicts to fix.

Prerequisites

• SmartFlow APS installed and your trial or subscription active.
• At least one work center in scope with a shop calendar (shifts) and a capacity (machine count) configured.
• Production orders — Firm Planned or Released — with routings that carry run time and, where relevant, setup time and predecessor links.

1. Open the Scheduler

Search for BDP APS Scheduler, or open it from the SmartFlow role center.

2. Pick your scope

In the header, set Scope to the order statuses you want this run to cover. Firm Planned + Released is the default and the right choice for most first runs — it schedules the orders you’re actually committed to without pulling in still-tentative Planned orders.

3. Generate

Choose Run Finite Scheduler from the Process actions. The solver runs in the cloud and returns in a few seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on how many orders and work centers are in scope.

4. Read the review panel

The Finite Schedule Review panel opens with the current schedule (“Before”) and the proposed one (“After”) stacked on the same board. Nothing has changed in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central yet — you’re looking at a proposal.

• Look for the small badges on moved operations — hover one to see how far it shifted and why (capacity, calendar, or a predecessor it was waiting on).
• Check the KPI cards at the top: makespan, late orders, on-time percentage, tardiness, and setup time, each shown before → after.
• If the panel shows an optimality-gap chip, it’s telling you how close this plan is to a proven-best one within the solve time you allowed — not a warning, just an honest disclosure. If you want a tighter plan, you can raise the solve time limit and run it again.
• If anything in the After strip isn’t quite right, you can drag that bar before you Accept — your manual edit commits together with the solver’s plan.

5. Accept

Click Accept to write the plan to your production orders’ routing lines. A results panel confirms what actually applied — green if everything went through cleanly, amber if a few operations were skipped with a stated reason, red if nothing applied. Reject instead discards the proposal and leaves every date exactly as it was; nothing is lost by rejecting and trying again after adjusting scope or weights.

6. Verify in Business Central

Open one of the affected production orders’ routing lines (or use Open Card from the order-detail panel on the Gantt) and confirm the new starting date-times match what the review panel showed. The capacity heatmap for the affected work centers should now read lower where it was previously red.

What to try next

• If your shop cares about changeover between products, run Sequence Optimization as a separate pass — finite scheduling and sequence optimization don’t share an objective yet.
• If you want the six finite-scheduler weights tuned to how your shop actually operates instead of the defaults, run the Shop Advisor — two minutes, no jargon.
• Before your next large change, take a look at Snapshots and Undo Checkpoints so you always have a checkpoint to fall back to.