Prepare for Year-End: Dynamics 365 Business Central Operations Calendars
In this video, we delve into crucial year-end procedures essential for the operations team using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
For those currently employing Production in Work Centers, ensuring that your work centers are configured with accurate shop calendars and scheduled capacity is vital. Failure to calculate the capacity and availability for the upcoming year might lead to complications such as errors during MRP or MPS operations, impeding production scheduling within Business Central.
The video primarily focuses on understanding the significance of two key calendars utilized in operations:
- Base Calendars, designated to BC locations, indicating shipment and receipt timelines at specific locations.
- Shop Calendars, allocated to work centers, dictating production schedules.
It’s crucial to establish holiday schedules for the approaching year and calculate work center calendars to allocate capacity for the upcoming year.
To commence the new year seamlessly, it’s imperative to ensure that your calendars are appropriately configured, laying the groundwork for error-free production within Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Keep up with what’s new in Business Central with our How-To blogs and YouTube videos.
Video transcript follows
Hello and welcome to this ArcherPoint presentation on Business Central year-end steps for operations calendars. My name is Alex Wiley. I’m a senior presales consultant here at ArcherPoint, and I’m going to lead you through this demo today. Today we will look at the two main calendars used for operations. Our base calendars are assigned to locations and show when we can ship or receive products at a given location. And then, we have our shop calendars, which are assigned to our work centers and drive when production is scheduled. Let’s go ahead and look at our work centers. If you’re already using production and work centers today, you should have already had your work centers set up with your shop calendars and your capacity was already scheduled. However, moving into the new year, if you haven’t calculated the capacity and availability for these moving forward, we often get contacted that there’s an error that people can’t schedule production or that they’re getting an error when they run MRP or MPS.
So today, we’re going to look at how to avoid that. We want to go back to our shop calendars, we go to related shop calendar working days, verify your working days, starting and ending times are all correct in how you want to have availability for the assigned work center. Then go to related shop calendar holidays. This is where you can establish your holidays for the coming year. So, for example, here, I’ve blocked off July 4th. Once my holidays are set, I go back to my work center page, and I go to process calculate work center calendar. Again, this is an important step, even if you haven’t added any holidays or made any adjustments because you want to make sure that your capacity is scheduled and available for the coming year. So we say, okay, and now this is going to go through using my calendars and create the capacities and of course, removing the days that I listed as holidays.
So we updated July 4th for our 24 hour shift for our drawing room. Let’s go ahead and go into process and calendar. Going to go back and look at the period with July 4th for 2024, say show matrix. And now if I go over, I can see that it’s calculated my capacities for all the other days of 2024, except it is omitted July 4th. So this is a good area to go in and check and make sure that your weekends are blocked off and any other holidays that you’ve assigned to other shifts were properly accepted and now you can schedule production on those days. Now let’s look at our base calendars. Here is where I can review
My standard calendars, seeing my non-working days, and if I go to actions functions, maintain based calendar changes, here’s where I can set specific days that I want to block off. Again, let’s use July 4th, 2024. Now this is marked as a non-working day. If I go and look at my locations, I can now make sure that my calendars are assigned and for my locations, if there’s specific days at specific locations you want to block off, you can go in and do that Here. All I do is select edit, set it as non-working, and then I can put a description for why that’s a non-working day. Unlike your shop calendars, you don’t have to run anything to update this. However, any sales or purchase orders that previously existed might have had this day selected. So it’s a good idea to update this as soon as possible so that your existing sales and purchase documents don’t need to be updated. That’s how you update your calendars. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment or reach out to us here at ArcherPoint so that we can help you. Thank you.