For Dynamics 365 Business Central · Premium

Your shop floor isn't infinite.
Stop scheduling like it is.

SmartFlow APS puts an interactive drag-and-drop Gantt and a real sequence optimizer on one screen — natively inside Business Central. See the collision, fix the run order, and write it straight back to your production orders.

7-day trial· No credit card· Billed by Microsoft
The SmartFlow APS scheduler inside Business Central: a KPI strip, a work-center capacity rail, and color-coded production-order bars laid out on a timeline Gantt.
Overloaded 3 orders · Fri 08:00
Resolved −98% setup · sample data

From Business Dynamics Pro — the team behind WarehouseQ, ContainerQ and Worksnip.

The blind spot

Business Central checks the calendar. Not the machine.

Business Central schedules each order as if it were alone in the plant. Three jobs can land on the same machine Friday at 08:00, and the only response you get is a load graph over 100%. It warns you. It never resolves it.

SmartFlow APS closes that gap — on one board, inside the product you already run.

Friday 08:00 · Mixing Station
CAPACITY 100% 101012 · Vanilla W2 101015 · Red Velvet W3 101018 · Ganache W2 ▲ 3 orders, one machine, same hour — 214% loaded
01 See · Move · Optimize

Three moves, one screen.

See

Every order, every work center, one board.

A color-coded Gantt grouped by work center, plus grid and workflow-board views. The whole schedule in front of you, not buried in a batch report.

Move

Drag a bar. The schedule follows.

Drag an operation along the timeline to reschedule it; the change writes straight back to the standard production order. Select any order to open its Business Central card.

Optimize

Run order, reordered to cut changeover.

The Sequence Optimizer ships with two engines: a fast algorithm that runs entirely inside Business Central, and a rigorous exact optimization engine you can switch on in Setup. Either way you review before/after and click Accept.

See it run

Fifty seconds, one board.

The overload, the drag, the optimizer and the finite scheduler — real screens, in the order a planner meets them.

Narrated · captions included · recorded on SmartFlow's seeded bakery sample dataset.
02 The solver

Real math, with its work shown.

Sequence-dependent changeover — allergen boundaries, color families, certification limits — is a routing problem, not a gut call. SmartFlow reorders the run against a changeover matrix you configure, and shows the before and after side by side. Nothing writes back until you click Accept.

Which engine does the work is your choice in Setup. Out of the box, a fast algorithm runs entirely inside Business Central — no egress, no configuration. Turn on the cloud solver and the same job is handed to a rigorous exact optimization engine instead; if it's ever unreachable, the local algorithm picks the job back up rather than failing.

Local algorithm · on by default, works offline Exact optimization · switch on in Setup Accept-gated · you stay in control
SmartFlow's Sequence Optimization Results screen: the current run order on the left and the optimized run order on the right, reporting 98% setup time saved, with Reject and Accept and Apply controls.

Screenshot taken on SmartFlow's seeded bakery sample dataset, which is built with a deliberate allergen-changeover overload. The saving is what the optimizer found on that data — not a benchmark, and not a result we're promising on yours.

03 What it does

Advanced planning — inside Business Central.

No second application. No separate login. No sync. SmartFlow reads and writes standard Business Central production data — one board for the whole plant, on the screen your planners already work in.

Drag-and-drop rescheduling

Move an operation, and Business Central knows.

Drag a bar along the work-center timeline to move an operation in time; the change is written straight back to the standard production order routing line. Select any order for a detail flyout with its operations, material status and conflicts, then open the standard production order card.

Sequence Optimizer & changeover matrix

Cut changeover by grouping work that shares a setup.

Configure a changeover matrix for sequence-dependent setup, plus tag-based product attributes for allergen compatibility, certification boundaries and your own constraint types. Two engines: a fast algorithm that runs entirely inside Business Central, and a rigorous exact optimization engine you enable in Setup.

KPIs, conflicts & material

Know the state of the floor at a glance.

A live KPI strip (active and released orders, average utilization, late orders, material alerts, high priority), a Detect Conflicts action for overloads and late orders, and per-order material availability that nets on-hand and receipts against demand and safety stock.

Snapshot & restore

Checkpoint the schedule before you commit to it.

Capture the current schedule as a named checkpoint and restore it later if the day goes sideways. It is a capture-and-restore checkpoint, not a side-by-side simulation — we'd rather name it precisely than oversell it.

Finite-capacity scheduling

No machine double-booked.

Send your selected work centers and date range to the scheduler and it builds a plan that respects every machine's real capacity — no operation starting before the one it follows, nothing stacked past what the shop can run, and every operation it moved flagged with the reason.

Shift-calendar accuracy

Planning around your real working time.

Shop and work-center shift calendars are honored to the minute. Calendars render on the board and the scheduler plans against them, so no work is placed on a closed day or outside a shift window.

Multi-level BOM · Order Explorer

The whole make-tree, phantoms and all.

The Order Explorer walks a multi-level bill of materials and its production orders together — phantom-aware, so sub-assemblies roll up the way your routing actually builds them, and you see what has to be made before what in one place.

Capable-to-promise

Answering "when can we ship it?" from the plan.

Test a new or changed order against the current finite plan and get a completion date grounded in actual capacity and sequence rather than a guess.

Net-change replanning

Rescheduling what changed — not the whole plant.

When orders shift, replan around what moved instead of tearing up a plan that already works, so a small change stays a small change.

Every capability above writes back only to standard Business Central production tables — and only when you click Accept.

04 Four views, one schedule

The same plan, read four ways.

Gantt

For planners — the timeline, grouped by work center.

Grid

For list people — sortable, filterable rows.

Workflow board

For the floor — orders as cards by status.

Capacity heatmap

For seeing overloads by work center and day.

Same schedule · Four ways to read it · One click apart
05 How a plan flows

From Business Central, and back again.

01
Plan in BC
02
See it on the board
03
Run the optimizer
04
Review before / after
05
Accept
06
BC routing lines updated
Writes back to standard Business Central tables — nothing moves without your Accept.
06 Built, not promised

We don't promise. We deliver.

Everything on this page is built and running — no roadmap dressed up as a feature list. Put it on your own production orders for seven days and judge it before you pay for anything. Nothing writes back to Business Central until you click Accept, so you can see the plan before you commit to it.

Runs inside Business Central

One screen inside the product you already run. No second login, no separate application, and no data to sync or babysit.

A solver we can prove

A rigorous exact optimization engine is available, and we can substantiate it. It is a Setup choice, not the default: out of the box a fast local algorithm does the work, and it keeps working when the cloud can't be reached.

A trial that's fair

Seven days on your own data, no credit card to start, and no reinstall trick to reset the clock. Microsoft bills you if you keep it.

Built entirely on the Microsoft cloud — Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Azure — the same trust boundary you already accept for Business Central. No third-party vendor stack.

07 Pricing

Two seats. One shared schedule.

Planners get the full editing seat. Everyone who just needs to see the plan gets an inexpensive read-only seat.

Planner
Planner seat
$699
USD / user / month · billed by Microsoft

Drag, schedule, run the optimizer, snapshot & restore, maintain attributes.

Viewer seat
$199
USD / user / month · read-only

See the Gantt, KPIs, conflicts and results. Requires at least one Planner seat.

7-day free trial · No credit card · Requires Business Central Premium

08 Questions

The questions planners actually ask.

Business Central already schedules production — why this?
Business Central plans against the calendar, not the machine: it will place multiple orders on the same work center at the same time and simply show you the overload. The Capacity Constrained Resource setting is a single-resource patch, not a plant-wide plan. SmartFlow gives you the whole board — the Gantt, four views, the capacity heatmap, conflict detection — plus a Sequence Optimizer that reorders the run to cut changeover and a finite scheduler that enforces machine capacity as a hard limit across the plant.
How is this different from other scheduling add-ons?
SmartFlow is one board, not two products — the drag Gantt, the optimizer's propose-review-accept flow, the capacity heatmap, and the grid and board views live on the same screen, inside Business Central. Optimization can run on a rigorous exact engine we can substantiate, or on a fast local algorithm, and you choose in Setup. And everything described on this page is built and running — we don't market a roadmap.
What data leaves our tenant?
Two different things, and we separate them deliberately. Your scheduling data: when you run the cloud optimizer, SmartFlow sends the scheduling data for the work centers and date range you selected over HTTPS to our hosted scheduling service. It is processed in memory to compute the plan and is not retained — our operational logs record that a request happened and whether it succeeded, not the data itself. Your tenant record: separately, when an administrator activates the extension we store one record for your tenant — your Business Central tenant identifier, activation and subscription status, country, and encrypted contact details — in our own Azure storage, outside your Business Central environment. That record persists if you uninstall, by design: it is how a 7-day trial can't be renewed forever by reinstalling. You can request a copy or its deletion. Everything stays within the Microsoft cloud, and the full detail — including the exact fields — is in the privacy policy.
Does it respect our calendars and changeover rules?
Changeover rules, yes, today: a configurable changeover matrix drives the Sequence Optimizer for sequence-dependent setup, including allergen, color-family, and certification boundaries. Calendars, yes: shop and work-center shift calendars render on the board, and the scheduler places work against them, so nothing lands on a closed day or outside a shift window.
How does the pricing work?
Two per-user seats. A Planner seat is $699 USD/user/month — the people who edit, optimize, and accept. A Viewer seat is $199 USD/user/month — read-only, for dispatchers, shop-floor leads, and plant managers, and it requires at least one Planner seat. Microsoft bills both. You start with a 7-day free trial.
What happens when the trial ends?
The 7-day trial runs on your own data and converts on day 7 unless you cancel. If it lapses, the scheduler steps back gracefully — it never deletes your data. Reinstalling doesn't reset the clock: trial eligibility is tracked server-side per tenant.
Do we need Business Central Premium?
Yes. SmartFlow depends on the Manufacturing module, which the Premium experience provides. That's true of any APS that touches routings and work centers. On Essentials, SmartFlow tells you exactly what's missing instead of failing.
We're a Business Central partner — can we resell or recommend this?
Yes. We work with reselling and referring partners and can provide a partner brief and demo tenant. Reach us at sales@dynamicspro.ca.

Put the schedule back on one screen.

7-day trial· No credit card· Inside Business Central