The Gantt Scheduler
The Gantt scheduler is where SmartFlow APS lives day to day. Production orders render as bars on a timeline, and the same board doubles as the surface you review a finite-schedule proposal on and the surface you drag operations across by hand.
Four views, one toolbar
The header bar’s view tabs switch the whole scheduler between four perspectives on the same underlying data:
- Gantt — the timeline board described below.
- Grid — a sortable table of production orders (see Grid view).
- Capacity — the utilization heatmap; see Capacity Heatmaps and Material Availability.
- Board — a read-only view of production orders grouped by workflow stage, for a quick status-at-a-glance without opening the timeline.
Reading a bar
Every order bar is colored by its Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central status by default, with a mono three-letter badge on the bar itself:
| Status | Badge |
|---|---|
| Simulated | SIM |
| Planned | PLN |
| Firm Planned | FRM |
| Released | REL |
| Finished | FIN |
Click the Availability toggle in the header to recolor every bar by material status instead (green/amber/red/grey) — a quick way to scan the whole board for shortages rather than status. This view’s accuracy depends on when each order’s material status was last checked; see Capacity Heatmaps and Material Availability.
A few other things you’ll see on a bar:
- A small red dot marks a High or Critical priority order.
- An amber warning triangle marks a component shortage or partial availability.
- A vertical line at today’s date, dimmed weekends either side of it.
- Light grey shading over the frozen-horizon zone, with a lock glyph in the header — a reminder that orders starting inside that window are protected from drag-rescheduling (see Drag-and-Drop Rescheduling).
There is no separate red “late” bar color. Lateness shows up two other ways: in the Orders perspective (below), a small diamond marks each order’s due date so you can see at a glance whether the bar runs past it; in the Grid view, the Slack column turns red the moment an order’s projected end lands after its due date.
Work Centers vs Orders perspective
A pill toggle in the filter bar — labeled Work Centers / Orders — switches which axis the Gantt rows represent:
- Work Centers (the default): each row is a work center, with a chevron to drill into its individual machine centers when the tenant has machine-center capacity turned on. Operations from every order sharing that resource stack up on the same row, which is the view for spotting a resource conflict.
- Orders: each row is a production order. The order’s summary bar shows its due-date diamond and, if material availability pushes the earliest possible start later than the routing would otherwise allow, a dashed amber line marking that material-ready date. Expand a row to see its individual routing operations — setup time renders as a hatched segment, run time as solid — connected back to the summary bar by elbow lines.
Dragging an order’s summary bar in the Orders perspective moves every one of its operations together, by the same amount of time; dragging an individual operation bar in the Work Centers perspective moves just that operation (and can reassign it to a different work center — see Drag-and-Drop Rescheduling).
Zoom and navigation
The board zooms through four granularities — Day → Shift → Hour → 30-minute — selectable from pills in the filter bar, or by right-clicking the board and switching the mouse wheel from its default scroll behavior into zoom mode. At the Hour level, a set of width multipliers (0.5×–6×) stretches or compresses the timeline further without changing granularity. Click-drag anywhere on the empty canvas to pan.
Click any bar to open its order-detail panel. Resize the resource-name column by dragging its edge — the width is remembered.
The order-detail panel
Clicking a bar opens a panel with:
- Header: order number, item description, and a status badge.
- Details: work center, quantity, priority, material status, due date, and the scheduled start→end.
- Material Detail: one line per BOM component — required vs. available quantity and unit of measure, and for anything short, the earliest date it’s expected. The one component actually setting the order’s material-limited start date is marked with a Binding chip.
- Routing Operations: every operation in sequence, with a checkmark for finished ones and a red CONFLICT badge on any operation the conflict detector flagged.
Two buttons: Open Card opens the standard Business Central production order card, and Reschedule switches you to the Gantt view with a reminder to drag the bar — it doesn’t open a separate rescheduling form.
Grid view
The Grid view is the same order set as a sortable table — useful for scanning a large schedule, or for finding exactly which orders a proposal would move before you commit to reviewing it on the board.
Columns: Order No., Item, Description, Qty, Ops, Status, Priority, Seq.B, Seq.A, Material, Start, End, Due, Slack, WC, Moved. Every column is sortable except Description; a search box filters by order number, item, or description, and GROUP: buttons collect rows by None / Item / Status / WC / Priority.
Two columns are worth knowing in detail:
- Slack — due date minus scheduled end, in whole days. Red and negative means late; amber
0dmeans exactly on the wire; a dash means the order isn’t scheduled at all (never shown as a false zero). - Moved — only meaningful once you’ve generated a finite proposal (see Finite Scheduling): a dash if there’s no proposal loaded or the order is out of its scope,
no shiftif it’s in scope but the solver left it alone, or the shift amount and reason if it moved.
The footer reports how many orders are shown out of the total, and the current sort.
Concepts behind this feature
New to why standard Business Central shows orders piling up on one machine without warning you in advance? Read Business Central Is Infinite-Loading for the mechanism, or Production Order Statuses in BC for what Simulated/Planned/Firm Planned/Released/Finished actually mean.