Drag-and-Drop Rescheduling

Reschedule a production order by dragging its bar on the Gantt. This is the manual half of scheduling in SmartFlow APS — the other half, Finite Scheduling, does it automatically; the two are meant to be used together, with drag-and-drop as the override for whatever the automated plan didn’t get quite right.

What a drag does

• In the Work Centers perspective, dragging an operation bar left or right changes its start and end time; dragging it up or down onto a different work center’s row reassigns it to that resource, in the same motion.
• In the Orders perspective, dragging an order’s summary bar shifts every one of its operations together by the same amount of time, keeping the routing sequence intact.

While you’re dragging, a small readout chip follows the cursor showing the target work center’s projected utilization at the drop point — a percentage with the scheduled and available hours, colored green if it fits, amber for a moderate overrun, and red once it clearly won’t fit. If the board can’t resolve real capacity data for that resource, the chip says exactly that — “Capacity unknown” — rather than guessing at a number.

Drops are staged, not written immediately

Releasing the bar does not write anything to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central on the spot. The change is staged in the board’s own state, the same way a Finite proposal or Optimizer result is staged before you act on it — you can keep dragging other bars, and every staged edit sits together until you explicitly commit them.

• Save (the disk icon in the header) writes every staged change to Business Central in one pass. It’s disabled with nothing to save, and once there’s a pending change it shows a confirmation dialog naming exactly how many changes across how many orders you’re about to commit.
• Discard clears every staged change back to the last-saved state, also behind its own confirmation dialog.
• Undo / Redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y, or the header’s icon buttons) step backward and forward through your staged edits — up to 20 steps in the current session — entirely on the client, with no round-trip to Business Central until you Save.

Staging edits this way means a run of quick adjustments — three or four drags while you eyeball a tight day — doesn’t mean three or four separate writes to Business Central, each one its own risk of a partial failure partway through. You commit once, when you’re actually done, and you can back out of any single step along the way with Undo before you do.

Combining a drag with an automated proposal

A drag on the live board and a loaded finite or optimizer proposal are separate staged states — dragging a bar on the live Gantt doesn’t touch a proposal you have open for review, and vice versa. If you want to override a specific operation inside a finite proposal before committing it, drag it on the proposal’s own “After” strip, not on the live board underneath it; that edit commits together with the rest of the proposal on Accept, rather than as a separate staged board change.

What’s protected from dragging

Orders inside the frozen horizon — the near-term window set on the Setup page — are shown with a shaded band and a lock glyph, and can’t be dragged into or within that zone. This is the guardrail that keeps the plan you already printed for tomorrow’s shift from silently moving under you.

Order status also decides what the board will move. Only production orders with a status of Firm Planned or Released are loaded onto the Gantt and accepted by the reschedule path. Simulated, Planned, and Finished orders are filtered out — Planned orders are still the planning system’s to move (see The Planning Worksheet vs. scheduling), and a Finished order is history. If an order you expect to see is missing from the board, its status is the first thing to check.

Concepts behind this feature

The frozen horizon exists because a mathematically better plan that reshuffles everything is often operationally worse than a slightly worse plan nobody has to re-print. Plan Stability: Frozen Horizons, Nervousness, and When to Reschedule explains why.