Capacity Heatmaps and Material Availability
Reading the capacity heatmap
Switch to the Capacity view (or look at the strip along the bottom of the Gantt) to see utilization as a color-coded grid — one cell per work center per date. The color tiers:
| Utilization | Color |
|---|---|
| 0% | Dim — nothing scheduled, capacity open |
| Above 0% up to 50% | Green |
| Above 50% up to 80% | Amber |
| Above 80% up to 100% | Red |
| Above 100% | Dark red — overloaded |
Each cell also shows the percentage and the underlying hours, formatted as 84% (21.0/25.0 h), so you’re never left guessing what the color actually represents.
A cell isn’t always a clean percentage, and the heatmap says so rather than guessing:
- No capacity data for this date renders as a distinct striped-grey cell, not a false zero.
- A calendar gap — Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central hasn’t generated Calendar Entries that far out — shows an amber “no cal.” pill: capacity is unknown here, not zero. See Extend Calendars below.
- Closed but carrying scheduled load (hours scheduled on a day with no open shift) shows a red “closed” pill with the hours — a real problem, flagged distinctly from an ordinary overload.
- Every work center closed with nothing scheduled shows as dim grey, deliberately different from the “closed but loaded” case above.
The work-center sidebar on the live Gantt carries its own compact utilization bar per row, with an “OVER” flag once a work center’s average load crosses a high-utilization line — a faster, coarser signal than the heatmap’s own tiers, meant for a glance down the resource list rather than a precise reading. If you need the exact percentage for a specific day, use the heatmap.
Extending calendars
If a work center is showing “no cal.” further out than you’d expect, use Extend Calendars from the Scheduler’s Process actions — it runs Business Central’s own Calculate Work Center Calendar / Calculate Machine Center Calendar reports, scoped to the work centers currently loaded on your board, so you don’t have to leave the Scheduler to fix it.
Material availability
Before you schedule or reschedule an order, SmartFlow can tell you whether its components will actually be there. The material check looks at, per component:
- Current on-hand inventory, at the item’s location.
- Open purchase order receipts expected before the date in question.
- Expected output from other production orders that produce the same item (sub-assemblies included).
- Competing demand from every other production order’s open component lines for that same item — not just this order’s own need — so one order’s “Available” doesn’t quietly ignore what three other orders are also waiting on.
- Competing demand from open sales orders against the same item.
- Safety stock, subtracted from what’s counted as available, so the check doesn’t plan into the buffer you set aside on purpose.
Each component comes back Available, Partial, or Shortage, and the order rolls up to the worst status among its components. In the order-detail panel, the component actually driving a shortage — the one that clears last — is marked with a Binding chip, so you know exactly which part to chase.
The material-ready wall on the Gantt
In the Orders perspective, an order with a shortage or partial component shows a dashed amber line marking the earliest date its material picture allows it to start, with a small cap glyph. It renders only when that date is actually known — an order with no shortage, or one SmartFlow hasn’t checked yet, shows no wall rather than a guessed one.
Concepts behind this feature
Modeling Real Capacity: Shifts, Calendars, Efficiency, and Parallel Machines explains why a heatmap needs all of this nuance in the first place — a work center’s real open capacity is rarely the simple number it looks like on paper.